


Two To Kathmandu

by shyday



Category: Doctor Strange (2016)
Genre: Chronic Pain, Community: hc_bingo, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kamar-Taj, Minor Illness, Mirror Dimension, Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-01-22 02:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12471512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shyday/pseuds/shyday
Summary: How many times has she asked him this question? If he closes his eyes, he could be back in his condo. Standing in front of his fireplace. His beautiful piano waiting in front of that glorious view.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Don’t be deceived by the length; there’s no plot here, just lots and lots of whump. There is a teensy bit of AdultContent at the beginning, but don’t get too thrown off by that either – or too excited (nothing very explicit, I just had some headcanon to get out) -- because the rest of the fic is my usual h/c. Warnings for a bit of questionable language; Stephen’s not very polite when he’s in pain. Written for the hurt/comfort bingo prompt minor illness. For those of you who somehow aren’t yet tired of my repetitive nonsense. You make me smile with my heart.  
> (Oh, Stephen. I do seem to just keep making your life worse…)
> 
> MCU canon. I make no money, because they don’t belong to me.

Stephen’s dragged out of sleep by an obnoxious ringing, something hard and plastic bumping against his fingers. He pries open an eye to rumpled blue bedsheets and the Cloak hovering just beyond the edge of the mattress. It nudges his cell phone insistently against the back of his hand. 

He’s sprawled face down on his bed; he figures out this much as his uncooperative fingers fumble to pick up the phone. He hasn’t quite determined what day it is by the time he gets the thing answered and up to his ear. He pushes out a grunt of greeting.

“Hi. It’s me.” Christine. As if it might be anyone else. She’s the one who gave him the phone after he’d returned from Nepal, the only person who has the number. Stephen rolls over onto his back, blinking sluggishly at the ceiling. He swipes at the sticky drool pooled at a corner of his mouth.

“Where are you?” she asks in his silence.

“Home. Where are you?” The light in the room is diffuse, dim. But not the dark of night. Stephen lifts his head to check the window across the room; the gloomy sky doesn’t give much hint as to the hour. 

“I’m at your front door.”

Did they have a date? His head feels clogged, still foggy with sleep. “Why?”

“Can I come in? It’s raining out here.”

“Hold on.” He sits up against the pillows, muttering the incantation to deactivate the warding that protects the front door. Brings the phone back to his ear. “It’s open.”

Hanging up on her thank you, he slides his legs over the side of the mattress to put his feet on the floor. The Cloak shimmies out of the way. Stephen rubs at an eye with the heel of a trembling hand, looks for the clock. Five thirty. He can hear the rain now, pattering against the window. 

Pushing himself up, he pads out of the bedroom and down the hall in his socks. The grey sweatpants he’s wearing sag low on his hips, the drawstring untied. His hands have been worse than usual today. Simple enough to blame it on the weather, but the cause doesn’t really change things; whatever the reason, it was difficult for him even to get dressed this morning. 

When he reaches the wide staircase landing Christine’s already inside, dripping a puddle onto the marble floor of the foyer. She smiles up at him through twisted strands of wet hair. “That’s quite a look.”

He doesn’t understand what she means until he follows her gaze and glances down at himself; the Cloak drapes over the soft cotton of his t-shirt and sweats in odd juxtaposition. He shrugs. There’s something forced about that smile as he gets closer, something sad and swollen about her eyes. “What happened?”

“Really, really crappy day,” she sighs, her eyes falling to her sneakers as she tucks her hair behind an ear. “I was on my way home, and I just –“ This smile’s more feeble. “Are you busy?”

He shakes his head, puts an arm around her shoulders and leads her into the sitting room. Her shoes make squishy squeaking noises; she definitely looks like she’s trying not to cry. Stephen blinks hard, sniffs. He wishes he could wake up. 

Christine removes her coat to reveal a matching set of green scrubs; when he offers her his bent arm rather than reach for it, she gets the hint and hangs it over his elbow. He takes it into the kitchen, drops it over the back of a chair and grabs a hand towel for her hair. He doesn’t bother to ask if she wants anything to drink. He doubts he can carry back a glass.

He returns to find her sitting on the flowered settee that he hates – uncomfortable _and_ ugly, the curse of inherited furniture – and Stephen gives the atrocious thing a glare out of habit. He almost wishes that he hadn’t brought the towel; enough water damage, and maybe Wong would finally let him replace it. Christine looks up from her fingernails, takes the towel from where it lies hooked over his wrist. 

He flops down onto the settee beside her, his limbs feeling inexplicably heavy. The Cloak billows out over the back of the couch, barely escaping being caught in his abrupt descent, and he ducks his head in apology. They both stare at the towel she holds in her lap. 

“So?” Stephen finally prompts, making a deliberate effort not to sound impatient.

“A kid. A little boy.” The false nonchalance of her shrug does nothing to cancel out the way her voice cracks at the end. “MVA. Mom killed at the scene.” 

She doesn’t fill in any more details, but he can imagine well enough. He remembers what it feels like to lose a patient. And the young ones are always the worst. He pulls her toward his chest and she crumples into him. 

He can’t tell if she’s crying, but she’s certainly shivering. It’s easy to conjure a few sparks in the pile of wood already stacked in the hearth – though his metacarpals twinge even with this accompanying flick of his fingers – and soon there’s a bright fire. The Cloak detaches itself from his shoulders, floating off to somewhere nearer the window. Stephen rests his head against the hard back of the settee and closes his eyes, listening to the crackle of the fire. Christine’s breathing.

She’s beginning to relax, warm and soft where her body presses against him. The moisture from her hair spreads a damp patch across the front of his shirt. “What did you do today?” she eventually murmurs into their silence.

“Not a lot. Caught up on some reading.” It’d been a rare day of relaxation, and he’d done little more than lounge around. Between the rain and an unusual lethargy he couldn’t seem to shake off, there hadn’t been a lot of motivation to do anything else. 

“Anything interesting?”

The arm looped around her shifts when he shrugs. “Depends on your point of view. Mostly ancient lore. I’d let you borrow the book, but first I’d have to teach you to read Sanskrit.”

“Oh you read Sanskrit now, do you?”

“Obviously. Otherwise it would’ve been a pretty frustrating day.”

She swats at him for this; on impulse, he kisses the top of her head. She smells faintly of strawberries, of the soap from the hospital showers.

When she twists to look up at him, fragile and disheveled, there’s a wave of protectiveness that his penis mistakes for arousal. He shifts his hips as it twitches against the cotton of his sweats. Her blue eyes are startlingly clear, wide and still wet, and though there are questions there he doesn’t read any trace of objection. Without pausing to think, he bends his neck awkwardly to brush his lips against hers.

The kiss is short but he’s already half-hard, his dick fully invested now. They’ve been together a few times since he got back, but this new thing between them is still nebulous, sporadic and not yet discussed. And his libido’s questionable at best these days. Something that makes sense from a clinical standpoint, what with the chronic opioid use, but knowing the cause doesn’t help him any with the problem.

_Not_ what he wants to be thinking about right now. Stephen slides his lips to her temple, buries his face in her dripping hair.

“What are you doing?” Christine hums, not pulling away.

“You can’t tell?” he mumbles, nuzzling the skin behind her ear. “Maybe m’doing it wrong.”

“No, you’re, ah –” His teeth graze her earlobe, and she breaks off with a breathy gasp that shoots straight to his groin. 

“Do you want me to stop?” he teases, his voice low and rumbling.

As an answer she shifts around in his arms, pulling his head down to bring their mouths back together. Not breaking the contact, he tips her the other way, pressing her into the cushions at the end of the short sofa. The thing’s too small for both of them; he’s more off of it than not, bracing himself above her with a knee on the cushions and a hand on the frame. His other hand slips under her scrubs, quivering over her smooth stomach, and as he licks at her collarbone he imagines the disapproving look if Wong were to walk in on them right now. Another thing he doesn’t want to be thinking about.

Christine makes enticing noises, wiggling beneath him, and he slides his fingers into her bra rather than try to unhook it. She moans as his thumb brushes over her nipple, as his tongue finds the pulse at her neck. Stephen hears himself make a few interesting noises of his own. The fire pops and snaps.

Her fingers are tickling at his waistband when his supporting hand gives a brutal spasm; Stephen yelps, barely having the presence of mind to tumble off the settee and onto the floor rather than drop all of his weight down on top of her. He hardly feels the impact, curling helplessly around the screaming appendage. All he can hear now is the tinnitic ringing in his ears, the sound of his lungs sucking in air. His hand feels like it’s trying to implode, the entire thing contracting ruthlessly. Unendingly.

Days later it finally begins to ease off, and after a few shuddering breaths he manages to sit up against the arm of the settee. Without a comment, Christine slips to the floor to sit beside him. She rests her temple against his shoulder as he futilely massages one hand with the other, his head bowed. He doesn’t really have anything to say either, nothing that will make any kind of a difference. 

The Cloak appears on his other side, fluttering anxiously. Stephen sighs, lets his hands fall to the floor; the massage is doing nothing to erase the ominous pings that continue to run through the tendons, and now the other one’s starting to cramp. Christine’s breath hitches like she’s about to say something. He’s relatively certain that he doesn’t want to hear it.

He almost wishes that Wong had interrupted them after all. 

Stephen leans his head back against the short sofa behind him, closes his eyes. “Come with me,” he hears himself rasp, as hazy idea begins to take shape. 

He feels her head come off his shoulder as she looks at him, but he doesn’t open his eyes. “Come with you where?”

“Nepal.” Wong had been nagging him for a while – it’s amazing how expressive the man can be using so few words – to come to Kamar-Taj and put in an appearance for the sake of the initiates. With no current Sorcerer Supreme things were in a state of flux, the novices having been mostly left to their own resources in regards to their training. 

“Nepal. Are you serious?”

“I’ve got business there, and you need a break. Being the intelligent, busy people that we are, we’ll combine the two.”

“I can’t just go to Nepal,” she protests.

“Sure you can. Call in sick, take some of that vacation time you never use.” He cracks open his eyes and rolls his head to peer at her incredulous expression. There’s a soft flush to her cheeks, her neck where it disappears under her scrubs.

“I… When?”

“An hour?” He shrugs, his lips quirking into a tiny smirk at the shock on her face. “Two? I don’t know how long you’ll need to get your stuff.”

“Just like that. ‘Hey, let’s go to Nepal for dinner.’”

“Well I was thinking we’d probably stay a couple of days…”

She gives him a look that’s not hard to interpret. _You know what I mean, Stephen._ He can practically hear her say it.

“Why not?” he adds. It’s far from an eloquent argument, but all the rushing endorphins have left him somnolent, slow. He watches her as he waits for her answer, concentrating mostly on flattening the wince around his eyes as his hand jitters through another threat of further pain. He’s feeling too self-absorbed right now to try and guess at the reasons for her hesitation. Almost tells her to forget the suggestion.

“Okay,” she says before he can. “Okay, sure. Let’s go to Nepal.”

“Okay,” Stephen agrees, trying to recall where he’d left his sling ring. “Go home and throw some things together.” He glances around at what he can see of the room from down here; it’s probably in his bedroom. “Nothing fancy. Preferably layers.” He’s going to have to get up.

Beside him, the Cloak unfurls a corner and a familiar lump of metal falls into his lap. He didn’t even notice it leave the room. “Thanks,” he murmurs, slipping the sling ring onto his scarred fingers. He opens a portal to Christine’s apartment from the floor.

She just blinks at him for a moment, and he wonders again if this is a good plan. They’ve only spent handfuls of hours together since entering this confusing new phase of what might be loosely termed a relationship. Even before, they’d been a long way away from anything resembling even temporary cohabitation.

But it’s likely too late now. Christine gets to her feet, and he can see her brain working in the set of her eyebrows, the distance in her eyes. “Call me when you’re ready,” he tells her, not moving from his seat on the floor. She smiles at him, steps through the portal. He remembers her coat in the kitchen as the doorway closes behind her.

Stephen hangs his head, absently flexing his cranky fingers as best as he can. A fresh memory of the satiny feel of Christine’s skin perks his dick up again with renewed interest, and as he hooks an arm over the sofa frame and hauls himself up off the floor he vaguely toys with the idea of finishing what was started in the shower. It’s probably not worth the effort; masturbation brings little pleasure these days, repetitive motion and a firm grip not on his list of strengths anymore. He knows he’s got to be a lot harder than this if there’s any chance of reaching orgasm before hitting the limits of his hand’s endurance.

The erection sinks in a wash of self-loathing, ending the debate. Stephen shuffles to the shower anyway, hoping to clear his fuzzy brain. 

It doesn’t work, and after shoving a couple of things into his backpack and getting dressed in his usual blue, he sits on the edge of his bed and stares dumbly at his boots while he waits for the phone to ring. He’d thought the hot water was doing a little something to loosen up his hands at least, but he’d been proven wrong when he’d only been able to get the backpack zipped a third of the way up. He’s trying to ignore the frenzied fidgeting of those hands in his lap, the faint taste of metal still on the tip of his tongue from having to complete the task using his teeth. 

He curses himself for coming up with this poorly-formed plan. He hasn’t really been back to Kamar-Taj since he moved into the Sanctum, and he’s already exhausted with the thought of having to sort through everything that time meant while also dealing with Christine. Stephen sneezes, hopes he isn’t coming down with something to top it all off. The Cloak tightens briefly around his arms like a hug.

His eyelids are drooping when the phone finally jangles on the mattress beside him, and the jolt that runs through him rattles his feet on the floor. His fingers complain when he asks them to function long enough to pick the thing up, so instead he simply opens a portal to her apartment. Christine steps into view of the aperture, still holding her phone to her ear; Stephen scoops his bag up with his wrist and stands, immediately joining her in her living room. It clearly takes her second before she realizes she can hang up the phone.

“You rang?” He tries for his most charming smile, grateful to see that she holds only a duffle bag. He’d been a little worried she’d want to bring a full set of luggage.

“I guess I’m ready.” She looks about the room for anything that might be missing. 

“If you forgot anything important, we can just come back and get it,” he promises.

“Oh. Right.” She’s changed into jeans and a white v-neck t-shirt, a thick zip-up hoodie and hiking boots. Her hair’s dry, pulled back from her face. “Sorry. It’s been a while since I traveled anyway, and this…”

“Is strange?” he supplies with a flash of a grin.

“Yes.” She returns the smile, looking far more relaxed now. “This is unquestionably Strange.”

He opens a new portal into Kamar-Taj, and the nostalgic sight of the open wood room melts away some of the tension he didn’t know he was carrying across his shoulders. He almost takes Christine’s hand, doesn’t when the erratic throbbing in his own makes him reluctant for any kind of contact. He motions for her to step through ahead of him. Follows her to Kathmandu.

The place is dark and still, and a glance toward the lattice windows reminds him that he’d forgotten to consider the time difference. Evening in New York, but the pinks and yellows of sunrise are just beginning to blush the sky over the mountains. Stephen’s wondering if anyone’s awake yet when there’s the sound of running feet and two initiates burst into the room wielding staves. Everybody freezes, staring each other down.

Stephen holds up his hands, one of his arms stretched protectively in front of Christine. “Hey, it’s okay. We’re friends.” His fingers twitch; he’s on the verge of calling up a weapon of his own until he can be sure they’re going to listen to reason. “We’re just –“

“Master Strange?” one of them says, lowering his staff. The other looks uncertain, his eyes darting between Stephen and his friend.

“ _Doctor_ ,” he corrects in a grumble, dropping his hands into the folds of the Cloak.

Wong appears in the doorway, looking as if he’s only just woken up. His eyes widen – slightly – then narrow – slightly – when he sees them. “Like the new alarm system,” Stephen tells him over their heads.

Wong simply stands there, barefoot and frowning. Stephen’s suddenly swamped by the old smells of the place, the familiar unique feel of the air. Memories shiver down the length of his spine.

“This is my friend Christine,” he says, unperturbed by the other man’s silence. “She’s never been to Nepal. I thought we could stay for a few days, if you have somewhere to put us.” 

Wong doesn’t exactly look thrilled to have a tourist on the premises. But then, Stephen can count the times he’s seen the man looking even remotely happy on one gnarled hand. 

“I know there’s probably not a lot of extra space,” he continues, “so we’re happy to share.” More stony silence. “Don’t worry, Dad. I promise we’ll behave.”

“Your old room is still open,” Wong eventually says, turning around to exit the way he came. “Next time, use the door.” 

The robed novices scramble to bow and follow him out, and Stephen turns to Christine. She looks a little taken aback by the greeting they’ve received. “Welcome to Kamar-Taj. That was Wong. _Super_ friendly guy.” He gestures toward the open doorway. “They’ll be having breakfast soon. We can get rid of our things and eat something, and then I’ll show you around.”

Christine shakes her head. “Oh no. After you, _Master_ Strange. You know the way.”

He loops an elbow through hers and they head for the door. “I kind of like it when you say it,” he bends to murmur into her ear. “Maybe you need to remember that one.”

Breakfast is vegetable soup and roti, a savory enough substitute for what would chronologically be their dinner. As always there’s no conversation, most at the table keeping their gaze contemplatively on the meal before them. He pretends not to be aware of the occasional curious looks sent his way; he’s unsure how many of them are new since he was here. Everybody kept mainly to themselves in this place. Unless they’d had some need to interact, he’d never given much thought to most of them.

Stephen barely eats; there’s too much attention on him, and with the way his hands are acting up the very obvious tremors make any attempt both frustratingly difficult and spectacularly embarrassing. The soup splashes in the bowl when he lifts it to his lips, a loud sound in all this stillness. And he’ll starve to death before asking Christine to tear up his flatbread in front of a table full of people. He probably wouldn’t have to actually ask, just acknowledge one of those sidelong glances that he’s ignoring along with everybody else’s. Instead he sits with his hands hidden by the Cloak on his knees. It rubs subtle circles into the muscles of his upturned palms in a way that sometimes helps.

He isn’t hungry anyway. He can grab something from the kitchen later.

The students vacate the room after the table has been cleared, but Wong remains seated. Christine’s virtually vibrating next to him; desperate, Stephen’s certain, to get him alone to find out what’s wrong with him now. He gives her a smile that’s supposed to be reassuring, overcompensates with the cheer in his tone. “So, Wong, what’s new here?” he asks brightly.

Wong looks him over, turns to Christine. “Welcome to Kamar-Taj,” he finally greets her, the soft hospitality practically exuberant considering its source. “Please feel free to stay with us for as long as you’d like.”

“It’s very peaceful here. Thank you for allowing me to share in it.”

Wong inclines his head, returns his focus to Stephen. “You, I have work for.”

“Oh good. I was afraid I’d be sitting around with nothing to do like at home.”

Wong remains perpetually untouched by his sarcasm; it’s nice to know there are a few things that never change. “After you rest. You’ll be more useful when you can sit up straight.”

Stephen blinks, realizes that there’s a definite slump to his shoulders. He corrects it with an effort he keeps out of his voice. “This is what I don’t get enough of anymore: Warm Fuzzy Wong.”

Wong scowls his Wong scowl for a long moment. “Welcome back, Stephen,” he finally says, rising from the table and leaving the room.

Stephen grins, hearing the sincerity. Christine’s looking skeptical of their entire welcome. “He loves me,” Stephen assures her. 

His smile disappears when she presses the back of her hand to the side of his face. “He’s right, though. You don’t look well.”

“Such a precise diagnosis, Doctor,” he snaps, jerking his head away from her. “How ingenious of you to manage it without any diagnostic equipment.” 

“Stephen…” she sighs.

“I’m tired. It’s what, almost eight in New York?” He doesn’t feel the need to mention that she’d woken him up from a nap. He unfolds himself from his position on the floor, getting up from the low table using only the muscles in his legs. The Cloak might help a little. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.” He doesn’t offer her either of the hands that hang aching at his sides.

It’s early in Kathmandu, but the streets outside the sanctuary are already beginning to bustle. He points out a few remembered spots as they walk, the happiness in her eyes a good distraction from the complaints of his hands. He’s confidant of his ability to protect them from any lurking danger, and they wander for over an hour down streets and back alleys. Christine laughs more than she has around him since the accident.

But he can’t climb out of the cloudy fatigue, the young sun playing havoc with his internal clock. Christine’s starting to look a bit tired herself when they return to Kamar-Taj. They’re granted entry by a novice he’s positive that he’s never seen before, those eyebrows too distinctive; Stephen gives the kid a nod and leads them down a hallway to their room. He can hear the sounds of sparring coming from the training grounds.

Either because there wasn’t another pallet available or simply to punish him for his life choices, Stephen’s been given a woven mat to sleep on. It waits on the floor next to the bed, the two of them together taking up a good chunk of the tiny room. He can already tell that it’s going to be way too short.

He sinks down onto it, not bothering to change out of his tunic and trousers. The Cloak detaches itself as he lays down; as expected, his long legs hang off the mat to stretch over the wood floor. Stephen rolls onto his back and bends his knees, throwing an arm up over his eyes to block the light coming in through the window.

“You should take the bed,” Christine says from the other corner. He hears a zipper, scratchy nylon as she digs through her bag.

He realizes she’s going to have to step over him to get onto the pallet. Decides that she’s a smart woman who can figure it out. “You’re just jealous,” he mumbles from behind his arm. “You can tell it’s much more comfortable down here than on that thing.”

Going by memory it’s a toss up. His legs didn’t fit on the bed either, and it had been just as unyielding. Maybe a little less cold.

“Fine, do what you want. You always d—“ She breaks off abruptly, continues confused. “Why is my phone asking if I want to connect to wifi?”

“Maybe it thinks you want to check your email.”

“But why is there…?”

Stephen shrugs from his supine position. His fingers jump where they dangle by the side of his face. “Dunno. But the password’s _shamballa_ , if they haven’t changed it.”

There’s a pause as she types it in. “They have not,” she says, still stupefied. 

“There you go. Something to do if you get tired of meditation.”

“Well I did bring a book. And the view’s nice too.”

“Try looking out the window. Even better,” Stephen quips, earning himself a snort of amusement. He listens to her shifting around, to a persistent solitary bird that sounds right outside. He wonders if it’s sitting on the sill; he doesn’t recall there being a tree out there. 

The bird’s the last thing that he remembers before Dormammu’s huge face fills the sky. Before his skin is melting, tearing. His eyes burning, bleeding. Sometimes it’s just one memory, a single horror replayed over and over; this dream brings back all the highlights, a Dark Dimension Greatest Hits. Stephen dies. And then dies again.

Again. Again.

He wakes with a noise that echoes like a shout in his ears, his shoulders lurching up off the mat. Cognizant of his _where_ if not his _when_ , his spinning mind can’t immediately reconcile the familiar walls of Kamar-Taj with the Cloak that wraps around him as he sits up and pulls his knees to his chest. He’s shaking, breathing hard. In what should be an empty room someone touches his shoulder, and he scrambles across the floor away from the contact before he realizes that he’s moving. There isn’t far to go. His hands don’t appreciate their part in the escape; the left one barks and his elbow buckles. Stephen crashes back into the wall that turns out to be right behind him, ends up an ungainly pile of limbs. 

Dazed, he blinks at Christine from the floor. 

She looks bewildered, and more than a little concerned. “Stephen?” 

“I’m fine,” he growls. Still mildly tachypneic, tachycardic; still trying to forget the sensation of having his skin flayed off in haphazard strips. But fine. To prove it he uses the wall to sit up. He slumps against it, his hands fluttering against his abdomen as he holds them protectively close. “Stop looking at me like that.”

Christine gets up and crosses the few feet between them to kneel at his side. Her fingers find his carotid artery, brush back the strands of hair that have fallen onto his forehead. He pulls away from her hand. “What was that?” she asks.

“What’d it look like?” It’s a snarl forcibly muffled into whisper, a hushed version of an ugly tone he knows she’s well familiar with. There were times after the surgeries – when the pain and helplessness were at their worst – when he’d lash out just to see how much she’d take before walking out his door.

She doesn’t so much as flinch. “It looked like one hell of a nightmare.”

“Keep your voice down,” he snaps. Anybody in the sleeping quarters would’ve heard that clatter; he doesn’t want them to hear this conversation, too. The slant of the light from the window speaks of afternoon, but he isn’t sure exactly what hour it is. He can only hope it’s not time for meditation. Or that he hadn’t actually yelled loudly enough for them to hear out in the courtyard.

“It might help to talk about it,” she murmurs.

Absolutely not. “Maybe you should’ve gone into psychology.“

Christine sighs, sits back on her heels. “Maybe this whole thing was a bad idea.”

“Nepal? Or us?”

“Jesus, Stephen…” she exhales. 

He rests the side of his face against the cool wooden wall, wishing he could just go back to sleep. There’s no point; he has no doubt the lingering dream is waiting. “Forget it,” he says, the vague flip of his hand meant somehow to erase the hurt expression he can still see behind his closed eyelids. “I’m just…”

The sentence trails off when he realizes that he has no clue where it’s supposed to be going. But apparently it’s enough for Christine. “Yeah,” she says. It sounds sympathetic, and he wonders what she thinks she heard. An apology? 

Had he intended to apologize? His head feels congested, foggy. 

“Are you all right?” 

The hand on his shoulder tells him he’s forgiven, at least for now. But clearly he still needs a distraction. “I’m hungry,” he lies, opening his eyes. “Let’s go raid the kitchen.” Ignoring the skepticism he sees on her face, he shoves himself to his feet. 

They skirt the edge of the courtyard on their way to the main building; it’s filled with sparring partners, the sounds of exertion and wood cracking against wood, and there’s a brief flash of relief with the thought that maybe his dramatic awakening had gone unnoticed. Stephen sees Master Hamir, nods to him when they make eye contact. The old man returns the gesture, turns back to the training initiates.

Christine stops, interested. Stephen shifts his weight back and forth between his feet behind her, unable to stand still. It’s not that he’s in a hurry; he’s beginning to recognize the flaw in his plan, that when they get to the kitchen he’s going to expected to actually eat something. His shoulder aches dully, a memory of pain. His eyes keep sliding that way, reassuring himself that the thing remains attached.

He’d watched Dormammu rip both of his arms off. As soon as he has this thought, a phantom ache starts up in the other shoulder as well. Stephen rolls his eyes. “Did you do this?” Christine asks, without looking back. “When you were here?”

“Yes.” His gaze flicks over her head toward the training, back down the path. 

“So, what? You’re like a kung fu expert or something now?” She grins at him over her shoulder.

“Something like that.”

“Ooh, is that why they call you _Master_?”

She’s way too entertained by that. He gets the feeling he’s going to have to hear it a lot. “No. I thought you said you were hungry.”

“ _You_ said you were hungry,” She turns around to face him. “What, is it a secret?”

“No, the full title is Master of the Mystic Arts.” Stephen shrugs, starts walking; Christine misses only a beat before matching his pace. “Only words. I’m a doctor.”

“Who’s also a master of kung fu, the mystic arts, Sanskrit…”

“Oh I’ve got all kinds of hidden talents.”

“I’ve never doubted it.” 

They reach the empty kitchen, and he decides that the easiest place to start is with tea. Christine leans against the counter beside him. “So what else did you do while you were here?”

“A lot of studying. Reading. I’ll show you the library later; that’ll be where Wong’s at." His voice sounds tired, rolling over gravel. He clears his throat. 

“How long did you stay?”

“Have we really never talked about this?” A warning twinge in his fingers arcs the question more sharply than he’d intended. He turns away from her, hangs the tea kettle over the fire. “Uh, most of the time I was gone. It took a while to find the place.”

He watches the fire dance, trying to preemptively stretch the threatened cramping from his fingers. The thin raised scars stand out starkly, nearly purple in the cold against his pale skin. He didn’t bring his gloves, had forgotten how badly he needs them here in the mountain chill. 

“Did you enjoy it?” Christine asks from behind him.

Stephen laughs. _Desperation, loneliness, frustration._ “I… found something. Not what I was looking for, but...” He pulls a breath in through his nose as his hand spasms; rubbing furiously at his fingers, he holds his hands a little closer to the fire with the hope that the heat might loosen up the tendons.

“Stephen?”

“Cups,” he grunts, with a truncated backward wave in what’s probably the correct general direction. He doesn’t want to turn around until he can find a way to soften the grimace he can feel creasing his face. “Cabinet.” 

She hesitates, but after a few seconds he hears her moving, opening the carved doors. He grinds his teeth together as his second and third fingers lock up, viciously cramping. Trying to focus instead on what she’s doing – trying to remember to breathe – he imagines he hears the clinking of china. The flames blur before his eyes.

“Are you –?” She stops, clinically reroutes the question. “Did you bring any meds?”

He flinches, works to straighten his shoulders from their hunched curl. “No,” he croaks. Though he might have to go get them. And his gloves. 

“Can I do anything?”

How many times has she asked him this question? If he closes his eyes, he could be back in his condo. Standing in front of his fireplace. His beautiful piano waiting in front of that glorious view. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” He pretends he can feel some of the tension beginning to ease.

The kettle whistles, and he tries to hide his faintly keening exhale in its sound. He hears Christine take a step closer behind him, grabs another fortifying breath before retrieving the water with his more functional left hand and turning around. His right hand hangs at his side, a shivery throbbing still running along the lines of its scars. “There should be more of that flatbread,” he tells her, crossing to the little table in the corner. He manages to keep his voice fairly level.

She finds it, brings it and the cups over to join him. They each take one of the two simple wooden chairs. He lets her pour the hot water without argument, his hands in his lap. 

An uncomfortable silence settles with the steeping tea, and he doesn’t have to look up from the table to know that her eyes are on him. Assessing. The shift from her relaxed demeanor is obvious, and he remembers suddenly that for her this was supposed to be a vacation. He’d wanted to give her a break.

So he makes himself raise his head, forces an enthusiasm he doesn’t feel in an attempt to entertain – distract – her with various tales of Kamar-Taj. He tries to keep his tone, his thoughts light as he speaks of the Ancient One, Mordo. She’s smiling again when he tells her about the portals in the library, how Wong had ratted him out. Submerged in the memories, he watches her body language calm with every shared tiny moment. 

He supposes he’s never told her simply because she’s never asked. Because, in the midst of everything else, those day to day moments hadn’t seemed as important as they do now.

But his life here had also been very repetitive, and he doesn’t have an unlimited supply of stories. When the only ones left all seem to involve things he doesn’t want her to know – recovering from the street beating, the sheer terror of being abandoned on Everest, Dormammu – the silence returns. It’s less critical, though. And Christine’s still smiling.

She turns to look out of the glassless window, and he glances toward the tea that’s surely by now gone cold. Wishes he had some coffee to help shake this irritating lethargy. His body feels bruised all over, like he’s still experiencing the ghostly echoes of Dormammu’s nightmare tortures. Though he’s grown accustomed to the dreams on some level, what with them coming so regularly, they still too frequently leave him rattled. But he doesn’t remember the physical effects ever lasting this long before.

Annoying. But less important than getting them moving before she notices that he never touched his tea. He’s pretty sure it’ll ruin her good mood.

“I should go find Wong, see what he wants,” Stephen says, grabbing the cup as he stands. The liquid splashes onto his unsteady hand, confirming its temperature. 

He carries it to the counter. “My watch says three-fifteen. Is that a.m.?” she asks from behind him. “What time is it?” 

It takes a few extra seconds for him to work out the answer. He’d certainly done the calculation often enough when he was here before, but his brain feels slow. “Two. No, one. Three a.m. in New York.”

A sudden tickle in his nose immediately precedes an unexpected sneeze, a totally insufficient warning. It rocks him violently, cold tea slopping over his hand and onto the toe of his boot. The Cloak flutters over his arm; when his eyes focus, he can clearly see small droplets of spittle speckled across the red fabric. Stephen makes a face, sets the cup down to wipe at it with his sleeve. 

“Bless you,” Christine says over his sniffling. “Look, maybe we should just go home.”

His pause is a stutter, a hiccup; he goes back to scrubbing at the cloth with his sleeve. Even if he can’t see any moisture remaining, the Cloak back to looking as it always does. “Why?”

“Well for one, I’m afraid you might be coming down with something.”

Deciding that it’s done submitting to his unnecessary ministrations, the Cloak ripples, pulls away from his fingers. “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t get sick.” He returns to the table, continues to clean up mostly one-handed. “If you want to leave, say so. Quit trying to use me as an excuse.”

“You know that’s not what’s going on.” His eyes dart up from the uneaten roti; she’s glaring at him, not backing down. He’s faced that look on more than one dark night. Stephen picks up the plate, turns away.

“It’s beautiful here,” she says, softening. “I’m happy to stay if you want to.”

“It’s just allergies. Altitude,” he lies. “Like this last time at first too.” Except it hadn’t been. He’d been surprised, actually, when it had finally occurred to him how quickly he’d acclimated.

“Okay,” she says, standing up from the table. 

He thinks she sounds unconvinced. Can’t help but note that she manages both the tea pot _and_ her cup in one trip.

When they pass the courtyard again, the day’s exercises have progressed from staves to magical energy. Christine appears absolutely entranced by the glowing weapons, the motions of the sparring men. “Wow,” she breathes after a long moment. “Can you do _that_?”

“Of course,” he replies with a shrug. As if it had been nothing to get to this point. “What? My life is weird now,” he says, in response to the look she throws him. 

She turns back to the training; he drops his eyes, swallowing the remembered aggravation and shame of standing out here every day trying and failing. He should really polish up his boots. They’re not exactly dirty, but there’s a markedly cleaner spot on the toe of one where the tea had splashed him. He swipes at his nose with a sleeve while Christine’s not looking.

“Could I…?” she starts. Stephen raises his head; she’s glancing between him and the men. “I know you wanted to find your friend, but can I stay here for a while? Watch this? Is that allowed?”

Hamir’s studying them from across the courtyard. “I don’t see why not.” As a woman he isn’t sure she’d ordinarily be allowed free reign of the place, but with the Ancient One having been female he can’t see anyone really raising any objections. Aloud, at least. “When you miss me, ask somebody how to find the library. That’s probably where I’ll be.”

“When I miss you.”

“You know you will. And then you can rescue me from whatever Wong has planned.” 

“Have fun,” she says, turning back to the sparring as he walks away.

Wong's in the library, as expected. He looks up from what might just be the largest book Stephen’s ever seen. Open, it covers almost the entire surface of the desk. Stephen wonders what it weighs.

“You don’t look much better,” Wong says bluntly.

“Flattery’s not going to get you anywhere,” he deadpans, falling into the chair on the other side of the desk. “I’m with someone.”

Wong’s eyebrows shift fractionally, but he isn’t baited to respond. Stephen looks back with as much expectant innocence as he can feign, trying not to sniffle. He really needs to blow his nose. 

But Wong merely goes back to his oversized book, apparently prepared to ignore Stephen until he’s finished whatever he’d been doing. The doctor slouches in his chair, his eyes wandering idly about the room. He thinks he’s read most of what’s in here, debates heading into the other wing to find something to occupy his attention. In the end he just sits where he is, staring vacantly at an out of focus corner of Wong’s desk. 

He doesn’t know how much time has passed when the other man replaces the pen in the inkwell, stands. Stephen blinks, sits up; Wong just gives him a look, inscrutable as always. He has no idea if he’s meant to follow. “What? Are we –?” Wong turns and walks out of the room. “All right then,” Stephen mutters, pushing himself out of the chair to trail after him.

His steps are shuffling as he follows, his feet heavy. Wong doesn’t glance back as they leave the library, not even when the doctor’s toe scuffs the wood and he stumbles. Stephen figures he doesn’t need to; he’s certainly making enough noise for Wong to easily track him. The sinuses on the left side of his face are thickly congested. Even his breathing feels too loud.

Two other Masters wait for them under the suspended globe in the large planning room, apparently meeting on some secret schedule that Stephen hasn’t been given. Only one of whom he thinks he’s met; he doesn’t recall the guy’s name. He almost groans when he realizes what they’re here to do. Sight Seeing takes an enormous amount of energy, and his eyes already feel barely open. 

It’s his own private name for it; if this psychic monitoring has a real title, he doesn’t remember having been told. He’s only participated a couple of times, and those under the guidance of the Ancient One. As far as he knows she was present at every session, better able to handle the strain than the Masters who rotated through the duty. With countless potential dangers and usually a few active ones, this distant observation is their first step in the protection of the planet.

Seeking out the various sites around the globe requires incredible focus, and he imagines now that this was another reason for the Ancient One’s constant presence. Without her direction their energies move in fits and starts, swooping together toward a destination only to be yanked off course at the last moment by some fleeting distraction. Stephen doesn’t think the fault’s entirely his, but he doubts he’s really helping.

Overall it’s a frustrating session – a sentiment echoed in the eyes of the other men, despite their placid faces – and when they finally break up Stephen suspects that they haven’t accomplished nearly as much as they were meant to. Exhausted, he doesn’t really care. There’s a bright singing pain centered directly between his eyebrows. The sinus pressure’s making all of his teeth ache.

He doesn’t realize he’s closed his eyes until he opens them, his hands with their spiderweb ribbing the first thing to sharpen in his bleary view. They rest alone on the orb; when he raises his head he finds the other two men have gone. Wong stands a few feet away, watching him. Stephen isn’t sure if he’s inventing the undercurrents beneath that stony expression. 

Probably not. Wong is mostly undercurrent.

There’s an equally indecipherable huff of breath from the man when their eyes meet, then Wong turns without a word and leaves the room. Stephen sighs through his one working nostril; that noise could’ve been anything from concern to reprimand, and he’s too tired to translate. The blocked exhale reroutes into his throat, tickling up a dry shivery cough. He works his jaw around, poking at his ear a few times in a futile effort to shift some of the occlusive congestion.

He stands there for a minute, ten; he can’t say how long it’s been when he sways and a staggered balancing step breaks the spell. He sags into the Cloak’s support as the room goes cloudy, soft. But he doesn’t actually lose consciousness, likely due at least in part to the Cloak’s gentle but insistent tapping on the side of his jaw. It’s annoying, and he swats at it clumsily as he struggles to straighten his legs. “M’okay,” he mumbles aloud, the words gooey. He wonders belatedly which one of them he’s trying to convince.

When the world’s a bit more stable, he wanders back to the library. Wong looks up briefly, returns to his writing. Normally Stephen would be happy to fill the silence, would enjoy trying to provoke some response. Instead he grabs a book off a shelf at random, collapses into a chair in the other room. Drifting in the quiet, staring at nothing, he finally remembers Christine. Thinks about going to search for her. He has no idea how long they’ve been apart.

Maybe in a minute. She knows where to find him. 

He glances at the book’s title without reading it, absently flips it open to an arbitrary page. Propping his elbow on the table and resting his chin on his palm, he tries vaguely to separate the squiggles into individual letters. It takes a full minute before it registers that the words are in Latin.

Stephen sniffs, attempts to clear his throat. Starts again at the top of the page. He doesn’t know why he’s bothering; odds are good that he’s already read this, and he’s certainly not retaining anything anyway. Still, it seems a better option than moving. He squints at the yellowed paper, rubbing at an itchy eye.

Motion just inches away snaps him back to awareness. “M’wake, what’re we doing?” he slurs automatically, blinking uncomprehendingly at the confusing slant to the giant tea cup, the retreating hand. A second or two later he understands that he’s got his head down on the table, pillowed on his folded arms. Stephen sits up, drags a hand over his face. His nose is completely clogged, the inside of his mouth cracklingly dry like he’s been sleeping with it hanging open. 

Surreptitiously he checks to see if he’s been drooling. There’s a couple of wet spots on the table; glad that he’d missed the ancient pages, he wipes it away with his sleeve before Wong notices.

He plants both elbows on the table and runs his hands through his hair, scratching at his scalp. His fingers twitch and tingle, and he can tell by their stiffness that he’d been holding them clenched while he slept, locked into their clawed approximations of fists. He winces as he tries to unbend them, pulls them out of his hair. They tremble on the smooth wood in a pool of light.

Stephen looks instead toward the steaming tea he can’t smell, to Wong waiting mutely with arms folded across his chest. There’s a distant bit of his fuzzy mind that thinks he’s probably supposed to be saying something, doing something. Possibly coming up with some justification for his behavior, maybe his entire continued existence as a Master of the Mystic Arts. But his brain’s stuttering. Caught up in a loop of one thought.

“You brought me tea,” he says stupidly. 

“You’re thirsty,” Wong tells him, as if that’s an actual explanation. As if it paints this aberration commonplace.

He is, though. Obscenely thirsty. He slides the cup and saucer closer, holds his face for a moment over the wafting steam. The china’s pleasantly warm against his fingers, the damp rising heat soothing his tender nasal passages. He’d stay like this forever if it weren’t for the persistent tickle in the back of his throat. Lifting the handleless cup in both palms, he scowls more in irritation than pain when the hot liquid sloshes over the sides to soak into his skin. But it’s worth it. He can’t taste it, but the first sip is pure bliss as it washes over his tongue and down his esophagus. 

“Your dreams still trouble you,” Wong says out of nowhere.

Stephen chokes on the tea, coughs. The last thing he needs is aspiration pneumonia on top of what’s probably a viral infection. “Not really.” The cup clatters against the saucer as he sets it down. “Sometimes.”

When he’d returned from the Dark Dimension, he’d done his best to appear unaffected. Unscathed. Easier to do with his audience shrunk to one; easier still with him no longer living on the premises. But running from sleep and its nightmares, he’d stopped by one day to look for a book. Made the mistake of sitting down, relaxing for a moment in the quiet of the library. Wong woke him up when he started shouting. Stephen’s pretty sure he remembers taking a disoriented swing at him. 

That’s right about when he’d stopped coming to Kamar-Taj.

“You talk in your sleep,” the other man says.

He’s frozen, doused with cold dread. All the time? Surely not. “You misunderstood. Whatever you think you heard.” 

They stare at each other in silence until Stephen’s forced to duck his head to sneeze into the crook of his elbow. It blasts through his sinuses, and some of the pressure in his left ear finally gives. Pushing the cup out of the way, he drops his head back down onto his arms with a groan and closes his eyes.

Had to have been those damn little kids. He’d just happened to be in the right place at the right time yesterday – the day before? – to prevent a wayward truck from plowing into their bus, and afterward they’d been all over him, clamoring for attention. Most of them had been sticky. It wasn’t a huge leap to assume some of them had been germ-ridden as well. 

“Why did you come here, Stephen?”

“You asked me to come.” He doesn’t open his eyes. Barely moves his lips.

“I ask you to do many things. You seem to have no trouble ignoring me.”

“Aww, do we need to talk? Sound s’like we need to talk.” He doesn’t have to see Wong to know that there’s glowering happening. He buries a cough in his sleeve, concedes with a slow exhausted sincerity. “Christine. She needed to get away. Know s’not a vacation spot, but… you know. This place. I, uh, I found a kind of peace here, and I just thought…”

Nothing. He pries open his eyes to find Wong studying him speculatively. Maybe. Even from just a couple of feet away, his face is a little out of focus. Stephen clears his throat, embarrassed.

“You’re absolutely right,” he sighs, pushing the chair back from the table. “I should go find her.” The congestion in his head shifts unpleasantly when he stands, and a muffled ringing starts up in one ear. “Listen, Wong, when you see Christine…” He glances around the room. Makes a slashing gesture with his hand. “Bros before –“ 

Wong doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. He might as well be talking at a statue.

“Nevermind. Thanks for the tea.” 

Wong says nothing, as usual. Watches him leave.

The breeze brushing his face as he steps out of the library feels wonderful, but with his stuffy nose he can only imagine the remembered smells that it carries. If it’s cold out here, he doesn’t notice. The courtyard has mostly emptied out when he reaches it. He doesn’t see Christine anywhere. 

Hamir’s gone too, Chan the only Master in sight. Squinting against the brightness of the flawlessly blue sky, Stephen walks over to him. “Chan. Hey. Have you seen my friend?”

Mute, Chan’s answer is a gesture: one hand coming up through the other – a motion repeated several times – and the miming of a flat surface. Stephen’s never studied any sign languages, but he’s never had trouble communicating with Chan in the past. Right now, though, the flurry of movement is a bit too much for his sluggish brain to keep up with. He doesn’t even have a guess. “I don’t know that one. Give it to me again.”

Chan repeats the gesture more slowly. Again, when Stephen just blinks at him. In the end it’s less about figuring it out than an elimination of other possibilities. “Maybe… growing? Garden?” he stabs. “She’s in the garden?”

Chan beams at him, nods his head. Stephen returns the smile, feeling a little pleased with himself. And now he’s at least got a starting point. The compound isn’t that big, but he’s not really in the mood to go poking in every corner. “Great. Thanks,” he says.

Someone calls his name and Stephen turns; instinct lifts his arm in time to grab the staff sailing toward his head. He catches it awkwardly but doesn’t drop it, fingertips stinging with the fumbled contact. “What the hell?” The kid approaching is short and wiry, looks like a teenager. Though Stephen might not be the best judge, considering how miserably old he feels at the moment. “Do I know you?”

“I know you.” Despite the respectful bow he offers Chan, despite the even tone, there’s a sense of rage simmering in the kid. Stephen’s eyes dart between his face and the tense grip he has on his own staff. “There are many whispers about the great Master Strange.”

Stephen shrugs. “Yeah, well…” The stick shivers in his shaky hold. “What do you want?”

“I wish to see if the whispers are true.” 

The kid takes two steps back, raises the wooden staff into a defensive position. “Really,” Stephen says flatly. He glances at Chan, but the other man merely arcs an unhelpful eyebrow. The people still in the courtyard are lingering, gathering. Stephen sighs, tries to clear his throat. “Fine,” he mutters. “I guess we can do this for a couple of minutes.”

He doesn’t consider himself a master of any martial arts, but he’s learned enough to hold his own. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that the kid’s not interested in a friendly bout of sparring. Stephen ducks away from a swing that whistles past his shoulder. He’s beginning to suspect that this guy might literally be out for blood.

He lands a satisfying whack to the kid’s side, and the boy dances away. The thin mountain air burns through his raw nose with every breath, prickles its way down his esophagus. It feels like every other exhale’s a cough. He brings the staff up to parry another strike, spins away. The congestion in his sinuses is unbalancing, and all these tight turns are starting to make him dizzy. 

He aims a kick for the kid’s legs, could be moving in slow motion for how easily the boy avoids it. “There’s nothing to prove here,” he huffs, barely dodging a jab. He hears the Ancient One telling him to let go of his ego. For a second he feels the snow whipping his face, the panic. It’s enough of a distraction to nearly get him nailed by a hit from his left; his empty hand comes up reflexively, and the solid wood cracks against the base of his fingers. He makes a strangled noise as he swallows a howl.

Curled pointlessly around his hand he staggers backward a few steps, the Cloak stiffening to keep him standing when his feet tangle and he trips. The dull ringing in his ear gets louder in some kind of sick competition, and his vision goes a bit murky. “ _Fuck_ …” he hisses through his teeth, trying to blink it away. 

“You are slow. An old man.”

Chan’s inching this way; Stephen waves him off with the hand that’s spasmed into a locked grip on the staff. “… show you an old man,” he mumbles, mostly straightening. It’s only a little slurred. 

He’s still working on the whole ego thing. It’s a daily battle, and not one he has room for today. He struggles to ignore the throbbing of his useless left hand as he launches a flurry of an offensive. The kid’s good, but Stephen’s pissed. Determined to end this as soon as possible. And he’s got an ancient relic on his side.

They trade blows in a violent ballet, the Cloak blocking as many of them as Stephen. His chest hurts and his head pounds, and each step seems to vibrate inescapably through his left arm. Any skill on his part is just conditioning now, his ailing body pushing its limits. It’s teamwork that finally takes the kid down, a one-two punch so smooth it feels rehearsed.

The Cloak sweeps the boy’s legs out from underneath him; Stephen pins him down with the staff pressing against the center of his sternum. Maybe leans into it a little more than necessary for a moment, just to make a point. “We done?” he croaks, trying not to obviously gasp for breath.

The kid scowls, nods. Stephen returns the unhappy expression, releases him with a cursory visual inspection for any signs of serious harm. The boy scrambles to his feet, glaring as he puts a wary distance between them. Stephen deliberately turns his back on the guy. 

The courtyard tips and he wavers, the Cloak again forced to supplement his failing equilibrium. A grimace twists his face before he can flatten it out; he holds his left forearm braced against his abdomen, hyperaware of all the eyes on him. He tries, but he can’t do anything about the way his shoulders shudder as he fights to keep his breathing level.

He walks toward the approaching Chan, handing him the staff when they meet. It’s difficult to get his fingers to unclench enough to let go of it, but their bitching is nothing compared with the mass of pain that’s the other one. Stephen peeks at it, a hesitant shift of his eyes. There’s already a nasty bruise spilling over both sides of his knuckles, creeping across the back of his hand and the lower halves of three of his fingers. 

Christ. Likely something fractured then; not hard to do with as many times as the bones have been shattered and rebuilt. Stephen drops his arm to hide it in the Cloak’s folds. He flinches when Chan touches his shoulder.

The other man’s face is questioning, worried. Stephen shakes his head, manages a flash of a crumbly smile. A blurry glance shows that the kid’s disappeared, that most of the onlookers are beginning to leave. “Well that was fun,” he grumbles, rubbing the bridge of his nose with jittery fingertips. “Maybe not what Wong had in mind when he wanted me to come out here.” 

Predictably, Chan doesn’t answer aloud. The bright sun makes Stephen’s sinuses tingle when he opens his eyes, setting off a series of sneezes. Chan looks no less concerned when it finally stops. “Allergies,” he sniffs, the lie sounding tired and worn.

A frown slants Chan’s eyebrows; he reaches for Stephen’s hidden left hand. Gets dangerously close before the doctor’s dragging brain catches up. Stephen yanks his arm away with a sharp inhalation that triggers a coughing fit, leaves him bent and swaying by the time he can find his breath. Chan’s frown has taken over his entire face now.

“M’alright,” he wheezes with a dismissive flip of his right hand. “Gonna go find my friend.”

If Chan has a response Stephen doesn’t see it; hardly finished speaking, he’s already turning away. Wincing as he swallows something that really should’ve been spit out, he concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other on a relatively straight path toward the garden. He’s positive that Chan, at least, is still watching. 

The moment he rounds a corner he collapses wearily against the wall. Elevating his broken hand to rest between his sore lungs, he realizes that he’s drenched in sweat; the heel of his other hand swipes at a rivulet crawling down the side of his face. He doesn’t think he has a fever worth mentioning, but it’s admittedly difficult to discern the source of the chills. Could simply be the way the mountain breeze breathes over his damp skin, lowering his body temperature as it cools the sweat icy. 

He can’t face Christine like this, needs to regroup and pull himself together. The sunlight glints off his still-broken watch; he has no idea what time it is. Doesn’t matter. Can’t be helped. If Christine sees him like this, the vacation will be over for sure.

Decision made, he pushes off of the wall; the Cloak steadies him when he stumbles back into it, gently propels him forward. Stephen gathers together the shreds of his balance, heads for the door leading to home. He can just pop over, pop right back. If he moves quickly enough, he might even have time for a shower. He keeps his head down, doesn’t run into anyone on his way. 

The chamber with the three doors is empty, silent until his bark of a cough bangs a noisy echo. Stephen glances around one last time before opening the doors to the New York Sanctum. 

The peace of his adopted home surrounds him, relaxing his shoulders slumped and his head bowed as he makes his way upstairs to his room. The medicine cabinet in his bathroom is his first stop. Ignoring the thermometer he grabs the bottle of oxycodone, the pills rattling against the plastic as he fights to get it open one-handed. Even with the easy-off cap, it’s difficult to manipulate his fingers with the coordination required. When the thing finally gives it’s a surprise, a shower of round pills raining down into the dry sink and skittering across the counter. His frustrated growl starts him coughing again.

With the extra time it takes to clean up the mess – the pills are small, each one necessitating its own focused coercion past the neuropathy – he doesn’t feel like he can linger too long in the shower. But he turns the heat up as far as he can stand, and when he gets out he’s definitely breathing better. Plus the drugs have started to kick in, dulling his hand to a background bass beat. Stephen clears the condensation from the mirror, studies his foggy reflection. He might just be able to pull this off after all.

After he dresses he finds his fingerless gloves, the knit stretching obligingly over his left hand to disguise the swelling and conceal the ugly bruise. He thinks about pocketing a couple of the oxycodone, but he’d told Christine he hadn’t brought them. If she finds out he came back for them, she’s going to want to know why. He could try and sneak them past her, but he suspects she’ll be able to tell. As it is, the two he’s already taken on an empty stomach have left him feeling a little stoned. He blinks, realizes he’s been staring blankly at his open bureau drawer.

He leaves the beginning day in New York for late afternoon in Kamar-Taj, finds Christine still in the garden. She’s sketching, a hobby he forgets since he doesn’t see it often. She looks up at him with a smile when he approaches, returns to her drawing. He tries not to be jealous of the way her nimble fingers maneuver the pencil across the paper.

“Where have you been?” she asks. 

There’s a hitch in his steps as he weighs her tone; she doesn’t seem upset, and he continues toward her. He feels a little like he’s moving through water. “Around. You don’t seem to be looking for me.”

Her profile dips into a frown, but she doesn’t glance at him. “You sound terrible.”

“Pfft. I’m fine.”

The casual dismissal gets him a quirk of an eyebrow, a brief sideways look. She’s trying so hard to appear unconcerned. Stephen’s trying to keep himself from rocking compulsively back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Do you like it?” she asks, tilting the drawing pad toward him for a better view.

The small garden is all vegetables and fruits and herbs, not very picturesque. She’s captured it fairly accurately, but he’s not particularly interested. “Sure.” The afternoon is dimming; it’s got to be close to five by now. “How long are you planning to stay out here?”

Christine shrugs, scoots over on the low bench so there’s room for Stephen to sit down. He doesn’t. His left hand hangs like a brick from his wrist, weighted and immobile. “I was hoping to finish this, if I have enough light,” she says. “But it doesn’t really matter. Do we have some place we need to be?”

“No. Just curious.” He coughs a couple of times behind his closed lips. His eyes play vaguely over the rows of growing things, and he remembers Chan’s sign. He wonders if that’s ASL. Speculates yet again about the root of Chan’s silence. He’d asked the Ancient One once, but she’d said it wasn’t her story to tell. Stephen likes Chan, but he’s never spent enough time with him to even begin to garner the details. “Probably time for dinner soon,” he hears himself say.

“And are you finally going to actually eat something?”

He glances over at Christine. Away. She’s watching him now, and he doesn’t want her to see the trouble he’s having keeping his eyes focused. “What’re you talking about? I ate.”

“When? You didn’t even drink your tea in the kitchen.”

“Didn’t realize I was traveling with my _mother_ ,” he grumbles, but there’s not much heat to it. His gaze lands randomly on a tiny stalk of green, barely poking up through the soil. He tries to figure out what it is.

“I’m just worried about you, Stephen.”

“Well don’t be.”

Christine’s humorless laugh slides his eyes back that way. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to do _that_ for a long time.”

“Try harder,” he snaps, suddenly tired of this conversation. Vertigo sweeps through him like a chill, and he sinks down on the stone bench beside her. He stares at the dirt between his boots as it fades in and out of a blur.

“I suppose you still don’t want to talk about the dream either.”

“Perceptive.” The word jumbles back in on itself as he swallows something trickling and disgusting.

He hears her pull in a breath like she wants to say something, but clearly she changes her mind. After a moment there’s the _scritch_ of pencil against paper as she goes back to her drawing. Obviously experience has cautioned her against waging this battle; he’s relieved. He can see the corner of the pad in his peripheral vision, the tip of her thumb where it curls around the edge.

Slouched beside her, he subtlely tests the limited function of his hand under the Cloak. It feels as if it might be more swollen, the yarn of the glove tighter over the base of his puffy fingers. Fingertips cold but not numb – as far as he can tell, having so little sensitivity these days as a baseline – and he can move all the digits. With pain. He’s privately betting it’s the distal end of his fourth metacarpal, probably a hairline crack. He’ll need an x-ray to confirm.

A murmuring voice asks _what’s the point_. A bell begins ringing before he can come up with an answer. 

“Food,” he mumbles to Christine. She makes a noise of acknowledgement, the pencil hissing against the paper as she finishes her shading. After a moment, she begins to gather up her things. Stephen waits, staring at the stone wall along the garden’s edge without really seeing it.

The evening meal is little more than a rerun of breakfast, except this time the narcotics and illness conspire to leave him undeniably drowsy and he has to pay attention so as not to faceplant into his rice. He thinks there are more sneaking glances now. No doubt everyone’s heard about what happened in the courtyard. He hopes this doesn’t mean more challengers.

He does make himself drink some tea, knows he’s got to be dehydrated. The heat of it is fantastic, but he could do without the way it pools in his empty stomach. And it’s doing nothing to warm him up in the long term; after every sip, he’s right back to freezing. He burrows further into the Cloak’s high collar and tries to keep his eyes open. 

Still he’s not exactly relieved when it’s over; Christine’s probably not very happy with him. Maybe they should just call an end to this, go home. It’ll be easier to avoid her until he figures out what he’s going to do about his hand. He doesn’t move as the room empties, waiting for the inevitable lecture.

But she doesn’t comment on the uneaten food as she picks up his bowl with hers, talks instead as he follows her to the kitchen about her plans for tomorrow. Despite the worry for him that she’s striving to bury, he thinks she looks more relaxed than she has all year. He can’t suggest that they leave. He doesn’t want to tell her about the mugging, but he does warn her to stick to the main streets if she intends to do any exploring outside Kamar-Taj.

Their room is dark when they get back to it, the setting sun a swath of bloody red through the ornate openings at the top of the walls. Stephen reaches across his body to tug the chain for the naked bulb above the mirror, catches a glimpse of himself as he passes. Even in the dim light he looks awful, shadows under his eyes and rosy splotches on his cheekbones, his nose. He scowls, sniffles as he crosses the small room to sit heavily on the edge of the bed.

Christine switches on the lamp by the desk. “So what’s up with your arm?” she asks, with what sounds like crafted nonchalance. “Or is it your hand?”

He pulls his eyes from the hypnotizing woven pattern of the mat he’d been sleeping on. “What?” he asks dully, even as her words are registering in his brain. 

She gives him an impatient look. “It’s obviously bothering you. You’re holding the whole arm really unnaturally, and I haven’t seen you use your left hand at all.”

“Not left handed,” he deflects.

She’s unamused. “What happened?”

“Well, see, there was this car accident…” he starts, in his best patronizing tone.

“Stephen…” 

“Nothing happened. It’s cold up here. My hands hurt.” She’s frowning even with this curt explanation. Done discussing it he tips sideways, his upper body on the thin mattress while his feet remain on the floor. He’s not really stealing her bed, just borrowing it for a minute or two. He’s certainly not comfortable.

She slides out the wooden desk chair and sits down, her phone in her hand. “Are you going to sleep?” she asks, scrolling through something he can’t see on the screen.

“No, I should go back to library for a while,” he says as his eyes close. There’s really no reason, other than a desire to be away from her trained gaze. “… find something to do without me?”

“You know, I do find ways to occupy myself without you most of the time.”

“Bet it’s not as interesting,” he rasps. His throat feels irritated, inflamed.

He doesn’t make it to the library, doesn’t give Christine back her bed. Lying there listening to her breathe, he suppresses a cough and tries to convince himself that the twinges in his hand are only psychosomatic, that it’s way too early for the meds to have worn off. His thoughts are slips of paper in the wind, wafting close enough to read but always blown away before he gets to the end. 

Unconsciousness pulls at him with sticky fingers. Just like those kids from the bus. 

He wakes to moonlight and pain, disoriented and curled into a ball. Shivering under the blanket of the Cloak and his hair limp with sweat, he figures out that he’s on the pallet – that Christine’s on the floor below him – without having to move too much. She’s got her back to him, and he thinks she’s asleep; he’s trying to judge the rise-and-fall rhythm of her shoulders when the pain spikes and slams his eyes closed.

Forced to breathe through his clogged nose so as to keep any sound from escaping his mouth, he becomes light-headed quickly. Has to switch to sucking in air through clenched teeth. The agony gradually fades to something more manageable, and he distantly wonders what time it is. Going by how great his hand feels, he’s guessing it’s been hours since he lost the analgesic effects of the drugs.

It’s not an unfamiliar sensation, lying huddled on this bed in the dark stillness of the cold night, hurting and trying desperately not to make any noise. He’d still been in the middle of PT when he’d found Pangborn, had hopped on a plane the next day. The first weeks here had been especially rough, what with those two cracked ribs from the beating on top of the postsurgical fragility of his hands. He didn’t sleep more than a couple of disjointed hours for days at a time. 

He might be trapped in a memory. But that wouldn’t explain the presence of Christine. It could be a dream. He feels feverish, untethered.

He’s still wearing his gloves, not that they’re doing much good. He’s a little concerned that the left one is going to have to be cut off. The thought scatters with a brutal stab from his knuckles that radiates throughout his entire hand; Stephen ducks his head into the cocoon of the Cloak, fighting to muffle his harsh breathing. The pain ebbs for a teasing few seconds, swells blindingly when his fingers give an unintentional jerk. He sinks his teeth into the excess fabric of his sleeve to keep himself from crying out.

He needs to get out of here.

It’s the only coherent thought he has, and it repeats in a timpani drumbeat. He’d fallen asleep still wearing his sling ring; he slips it onto the fingers of his left hand and wiggles down to the end of the bed so he can climb over Christine’s legs. The room wobbles drunkenly, smears when a series of spasms brings a new surge of pain. He chokes on his gasp, clears Christine’s sleeping form with an unsteady stretch of a step. 

But all he can conjure are sparks, and his ragged breathing provokes a cough that he struggles to smother. “Stephen?” Christine shifts on the mat behind him, sounding only half awake. 

“Go back to sleep,” he grinds out, not turning around.

“What’s wrong? Where are you going?”

“Nothin’srong,” he slurs. “I’ll be right b—” The pain crests nauseatingly, explodes into seafoam that fills his head, his mouth. Doubles him over, one useless hand cradling the other, and the noise he makes sounds like something between a growl and a moan. He’s got to get out of here. The door home feels distant, unreachable, as does the possibility of a portal. Only one other option.

“I’m gonna… nngh… I’ll… _fuck_ … jus’ don’t freak out,” is the best he can do by way of explanation, warning, before he shatters a doorway to the Mirror Dimension. Christine makes a surprised sound, but he doesn’t have time for her. A staggered step, and he tumbles through. He crashes to his knees. Something catches on his boot, falls over it. 

There’s no room for shock when Christine lands on her hands and knees beside him. A savage throb through his knuckles instantly steals his attention, folding him in half with a deep groan. 

“What. Just. Happened.”

His chest is tight, and he tries to determine if the cause is physical or mental to distract himself from the sensation of not getting enough air. The Cloak rubs a circle between his shoulderblades as he rocks on his knees.

“Talk to me, Stephen. What’s wrong? What the hell’s going on?”

“Why’d you…?” he pushes through his teeth, twisting his bowed head to look at her. The picture his eyes give him is far from in focus, her sleep-tousled hair framing her blurry face in a fuzzy halo. The slightly out of sync feeling of the room around her makes him uncomfortably aware of the tea sloshing around in his stomach. “What’re you doing… nngh… doing h—” 

Another twitch of his fingers slices through the question, bends him forward over his knees until his forehead’s flat against the floor. Mindful of pressure on the broken bone, his hands are sandwiched between his abdomen and thighs in an attempt to keep them still. “Ow ow christ ow ow ow…” Now that Christine’s the only one who can hear him, he’s less inclined to fight the vocalizations. 

“Hang on. I have some ibuprofen in my bag. I know it’s not much, but…” 

The odd quality of the sound in here wraps itself around her voice, her footsteps. Or maybe that’s just the ringing in his ears. He realizes what she’s trying to do at presumably the same moment she reaches her bag; he pictures her hand swiping futilely through it in time with the confused noise that she makes. “Mirror Dimension,” he mumbles from the floor.

“I’m sorry. Did you just say we’re in another _dimension_?”

It’d be funny if he wasn’t so miserable. He grits his teeth and presses his forehead harder into the floorboard as the pain jumps again. “I know. S’weird,” he forces out when it begins to lessen. “One might even say str—”

“One really shouldn’t,” she interrupts, returning to his side. “How do we get out of here?”

“Shouldn’t be here at all.” 

“Don’t blame me,” she says, dropping to her knees next to him. Stephen cracks open an eye to squint at her. “Your…” She waves a hand behind him. “It pulled me in here. Guess it thought you needed me.”

He’d glare at the Cloak if he could lift his head. He coughs, warm wet air reflected back by the wood. Tries to clear his throat. “Gimme a minute. Didn’t… didn’t want to wake anyone up.”

“What’s going on?” Her hand’s on his bicep, slides toward his elbow. “Is this breakthrough pain? Or something else? Any other symptoms?”

He tenses further as her hand curves over the jutting bend of his elbow to his forearm. “Took a hit,” he admits to the floor. “Sparring. Fracture plus cold plus intractable tremor…” His fingers quiver against his stomach in unnecessary demonstration; he sucks in a breath as the pain soars. “Ow fuck fuck fuck,” he exhales, mashing his forehead, his nose, into the wood. He imagines pressing so strongly that he breaks through the floorboards. It’s going to be an annoying spot to have a bruise. 

A splintered snapping, Christine’s surprised squeak. “Stephen!” She sounds scared.

With effort he wrests open his eyes, raises his head a few inches; they’re on a wooden island, separated from the rest of the room by a fissured ring. Mirror Dimension. Right. “Oops.” Christine huddles close, shooting nervous glances between him and the chasm behind her. “Hang on,” he mumbles. “I can…”

Freeing his right hand from where it’s trapped against his legs, he holds his palm over the thick crack and watches blearily as it begins to knit itself back together. It takes energy he can’t really spare, and the circle only seals itself about halfway around before his strength fizzles out. Good enough. Christine looks happier now that her side at least is again connected to solid ground. Stephen lets his pounding head fall onto his outstretched arm; his back’s not going to thank him if he spends too much longer in this contorted position.

“So, um… is that going to happen again?” Christine asks, clearly still unnerved.

“No. My fault.” He rolls off his knees onto his right side, conscious of the crevasse still behind him. His hand complains loudly as it’s jarred by the lurching shift in position, and he curls around it with a moan.

He flinches when her fingers unexpectedly stroke his hair, opens his eyes to a close-up view of her denim-clad thighs. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen it this bad,” she observes softly above him. “Is it still like this a lot?”

He doesn’t turn his head to look up at her face, plays his heavy eyes instead over the stitched seam that curves up from the inside of her knee. “Told you. Extenuating circum—“ The pain arcs again, and his attempt at a controlled exhalation comes out sounding more like a whimper.

“Give me a number,” she says, running her fingers through the hair at his temple.

The cartoon faces of the pain scale dance in the air behind her back – with even anguished number ten not really seeming to adequately express what this feels like – and he wonders if she’d see them if she turns around. “Six,” he huffs through his teeth.

“You’re so full of shit,” she says, not unkindly. 

It’s a familiar exchange between them, practiced so many times since the accident. It makes him tired. He closes his eyes, coughing a few times behind compressed lips.

“We should go home,” she says.

“Yeah,” he sighs. 

“Should I be worried that the way we got in here doesn’t seem to be there anymore?”

She’s already worried; it vibrates through every word. A trickle of moisture worms its itchy way along the side of his nose, and he’s unsure if it’s a tear or sweat. “No. Gimme a _mmm_ … gimme a minute. Get us back.” 

“Take your time. I’m busy anyway. I’m trying to decide if I’m more upset that you were hiding a broken bone, or that I missed a chance to see you fight.”

“Wasn’t my idea,” he protests feebly from behind closed eyelids. “Some kid. Challenged me.”

“And of course you had to accept.”

“Course,” he murmurs unapologetically. “Witnesses.”

“Uh-huh.” Her hand leaves his hair to return to his forearm. His eyes blink open, landing warily on the contact. “Can I take the glove off?” she asks.

“No.” He’d pull his arm away from her if he had anywhere to go; it twitches under her hand, the broken appendage still buried against his abdomen in the folds of his tunic. “Nothing you can do.”

“Can I at least see it?” She doesn’t drag his hand forcibly out of hiding, but she doesn’t give up and let go of his arm either. “How’s the circulation? Do you still have sensation in all of your fingers?"

The digits in question are thrilled to speak up when the spotlight falls on them, flourishing a series of pangs that dart erratically up and down their length. “Unfortunately,” Stephen grumbles. “S’no worse than before.”

“Please let me look at it,” she says, her hand inching its way toward his wrist.

“Fine,” he surrenders wearily, carefully extricating his trembling hand. He tracks every motion of her pale fingers as they move delicately over the glove, his skin. When the room begins to sparkle in his peripheral vision, slowly dissolving in a glittery drizzle, he realizes that he’s holding his breath.

Christine’s hands freeze on his. “Okay, now it’s… what? Snowing inside? I’m really not sure I like this whole alternate dimension thing.”

Shit. It’s the whole room, not just in his head. Stephen blinks deliberately, wills the world around them to resolidify. He breathes through a flush of heat, nausea. “S’a bad idea,” he grunts, reclaiming his hand and trying to prop himself up onto his unsteady right elbow. “Need to get you out of here.”

Her laugh sounds shaky; he doesn’t glance at her, his focus consumed by the impossibility of sitting up. “I’m not going to argue,” she says. She and the Cloak haul him upright, keep him that way when his eyes roll briefly in their orbits. The crap in his sinuses cheerfully redistributes itself with the change in position. 

“You feel a little warm,” Christine says, her hand slipping from his arm to the bare skin under his jaw.

“Don’t.” He’s _uncomfortably_ warm, and tiny flames begin to lick at the top of the wall behind her as his brain registers this. “Not if you want me to… Jus’ shut up for a minute.” He vaguely notes the frown that flitters over her face, most of his attention on the creeping fire.

Drawing on the focus that had once helped him to become such an incomparable surgeon, he manages to break a hole in the veil between this Kamar-Taj and theirs. It leaves him dizzy and weak, and the Cloak does most of the work to get him up onto his feet. He coughs harshly, intentionally, trying to get rid of the tickle in his throat before they reenter the real world. 

Christine stands too. “Uh, Stephen…” she starts, noticing the fire for the first time. The flames have taken over most of the far wall now, eerie in their smokeless silence.

He puts his less damaged hand on her shoulder, urges her to turn toward the shattered doorway. “S’fine. We’re leaving.”

“But…”

He gives her a little shove between the shoulderblades, accidentally a bit harder than strictly necessary; she doesn’t look pleased when he follows her through, but his stumble immediately distracts her back to concern. He doesn’t do it on purpose, but a distant part of his mind still recognizes the benefit of the timing.

“I just need to grab my bag,” she whispers, thankfully aware of their new slumbering surroundings, “then I’m ready to go.” But she doesn’t release his arm. Maybe she’s afraid that he won’t stay standing without her. 

Not willing to wait here all night while she debates it, he jerks his chin toward the duffle bag by the window. After another second of consideration she lets him go, crosses the moonlit room. She keeps throwing glances at the unscorched wall, checking again and again for nonexistent flames. Stephen pulls the Cloak more tightly around himself, suddenly chilled.

He scowls when she picks up his backpack as well, reaches to take it from her. She ignores the gesture. “So, um, how do we get out of here?”

“There’s a door.” He shifts his shoulders, working to coax the Cloak’s high collar to cover more of his neck. “C’mon.”

“Should we… I don’t know. Leave a note?”

“They’ll figure it out. I’ll call Wong or something tomorrow.”

He leads the way out of the room, trying not to bump into the walls as they move down the narrow corridor. He feels like shit – admittedly not his most brilliant diagnosis – is shuffling along entirely on autopilot. They’re nearly there when a sideways step tips him off-balance, thumps his elbow into the wall. The impact jams the knuckles of his left hand into the cradling palm of his right.

He blinks, and he’s on the ground.

His hand’s a mess of blazing shouting suffering, and he’s become incapable of distinguishing new damage from old. Christine’s hovering too close, her voice an annoying buzz. He doesn’t waste time attempting to translate. “Up,” he demands, somehow managing to garble even this one-syllable word. He thrusts his right arm in the air petulantly when neither the Cloak nor Christine instantly responds. “Somebody… somebody… ffffu… _up_ , dammit…” He doesn’t want to be down here when people arrive to investigate the noise. 

One of them pulls him to his feet – Stephen isn’t really sure which with the way things are spinning, doesn’t really care – and now they’re both pressed against him like a sweltering second skin. He can’t do much to escape the Cloak, but he shrugs off Christine’s clinging hold on his arm. 

“Are you alright?” she asks in a murmur.

“What d’you think?” he snarls. He doesn’t need to look at her to see her frown. It’s not important; he can’t focus on her now. His pulse beats in his knuckles as if working to split them apart, and his head feels packed with gauze. It doesn’t really leave enough space for anything but the thought of getting home. “S’go.” 

Hunched around the hand braced against his sternum, he moves down the hall as quickly as he’s able. He doesn’t want to run into anybody. The only light in here is what’s leaking in from the night outside, and he’s grateful for the dark. He’s sure that every heartbeat of pain can be clearly read on his face. He doesn’t have the patience to deal with Christine’s worry. 

Wong emerges from a shadow as they reach their destination, and Stephen staggers when he’s suddenly forced to stop short his plodding gait. “Bet you’re fantastic at hide-and-seek,” he mutters, trying to reestablish some kind of equilibrium. Christine’s poised at his elbow, not touching him but obviously ready to grab onto him at any second. He should tell her not to bother; the Cloak’s already rigid, the only reason he’s standing up more or less straight.

Wong’s eyes glint in the moonlight as he looks them over. “You’re leaving.”

Stephen can’t interpret how the other man feels about this. “Yeah,” he rasps, glad nobody’s expecting him to speak above a whisper. “Christine has to work.”

He carefully avoids looking over at her; she doesn’t call him out on the lie. But Wong’s pursed mouth says he’s not buying it anyway. Stephen ducks his head, biting down hard on his lower lip as another rumble of agony rolls through his hand like a semi. He’s so close to home. The door’s right there. Home means drugs, his bed. He drags his eyes back open when he notices that they’ve closed.

“Call me if you need me,” he mumbles, risking a step past Wong toward the door. When his knee doesn’t immediately buckle, when the room stays right side up, he takes another. 

“Thank you,” Christine says behind him. “It was wonderful to be here.”

If Wong has a nonverbal response to this, Stephen doesn’t turn around to see it. “Yeah. What she said,” he wheezes, opening the doors to the Sanctum. The marble floor shimmers beyond the barrier that separates the two locations. Christine joins him, gaping at the sight through the doorframe.

“That’s…”

“New York,” he confirms in a low voice. Over his shoulder he says, “Hey, Wong… thanks. I’ll, uh, talk to you soon.”

Wong’s soft murmur follows him as they step through. “Be well, Stephen.” 

He glances back with a surprised smirk, but the doors are already closing. Rubbing his nose on his sleeve, he ignores Christine and crosses the foyer to the stairs. There seems to be more of them than there used to be as he stands at the bottom, glowering up at the distant landing. _Drugs. Bed._ He takes a bracing breath; it fragments into a coughing fit that leaves his eyes watering.

Now Christine’s beside him, her hand on his back. His frown slides briefly that way before he pulls apart from her to begin the climb up the polished steps. It’s slow going, his feet heavy and clumsy, and he’s grateful for the protection of his boots as he stubs his toes against another riser. He’s on the wrong side of the wide staircase, the bannister useless to him on his left. His heartbeat reverberates through his hand where he clutches it to his chest.

He has to stop at the landing to catch his breath. When he sways, the Cloak’s quick reaction is the only thing that keeps him from tumbling back down the steps and undoing all of his hard work. _Drugs. Bed._ He can’t hear out of his left ear again; Christine’s flittering around, and he resists a cranky urge to swat at her like a bug. Instead he starts reluctantly up the second flight of stairs. 

Bent nearly double, he tries to distract himself by coming up with songs with the word step in the title. “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone.” The Monkees, nineteen sixty-six. “Gimme Three Steps.” Nineteen seventy-three, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Bruce Springsteen, “One Step Up.” Nineteen eighty-seven. Alice Cooper’s “Step On You”… was that also eighty-seven? He’s pretty sure that was in eighty-seven. Def Leppard, “Two Steps Behind.” Nineteen ninety-three.

He grunts when a cramp rips through his hand, trips on the top stair and stumbles into the turn toward his room. _Drugs. Bed._ He’s going to get that put on a t-shirt. Christine trails behind him, close enough that he’d tell her to back off if he could pry his teeth apart. It’s freezing in here. He wonders if there’s any wood in the fireplace in his bedroom.

She follows him into the bathroom, their eyes meeting in the mirror before he paws open the medicine cabinet. The cap on the pill bottle is no more cooperative this time around, and after a few seconds of fumbling with it he throws it into the sink with a frustrated noise. It bounces around the porcelain bowl, settles against the drain. Christine drops their bags on the floor and scoops it up.

The cap pops off effortlessly under her fingers. Stephen scowls but obediently holds out his right hand, the promise of relief a higher priority right now than his pride. She puts a single pill in his jittery palm. He doesn’t take it, gesturing impatiently for another.

“How many of these have you already had today?” she asks.

Stephen swallows the first pill dry, cringing as it creeps a clunky path down his esophagus. Holding out his palm again, he glares at her reflection. “Doctor too. Not gonna OD on my meds.” It rankles to wait for her to dole out pills like this. “Gimme another one.”

She relents, tipping another pill into his hand. It traces the same difficult path as the first. “I’m just asking,” she says, her tone searching for peace. “It’s not hard to tell when you’re medicated. Your eyes were practically crossed earlier.” 

“Mmm.” Suddenly dizzy, he closes his eyes; he clings onto the counter with one hand, his chin drooping toward his chest. Christine says his name. When he wrenches his eyes open again the room wavers around his head, and he’s afraid for a moment that he’s somehow flung them back into the Mirror Dimension. But he decides Christine’s way too calm for that. “Bed,” he informs her, shoving himself away from the sink.

“You need an x-ray,” she insists, lingering in the bathroom as he staggers to his bed. As he collapses onto the comforter, he hears the toilet paper roll rattling in its holder. Fully clothed and still wearing his boots, he pulls up his knees to curl around his broken hand, the Cloak readjusting itself to act as a blanket.

He watches Christine enter the room through slitted eyes, lazily tracks her as she approaches the bed. She sets a folded ream of toilet paper on the blanket a few inches from his face. “X-Ray,” she repeats, like he might not have understood.

“Later,” he says, dismissing her by closing his eyes. He knows it won’t work, but he tries anyway.

“Or we could go right now. Get it over with,” she parries.

“Sleeping right now. Go aw-way.” His breath hitches on the last word, a rogue burst of pain catching him by surprise. Writhing a bit on the mattress, he reminds himself that the drugs should start working any minute. 

Any minute. Any minute.

Her hand cups his bent neck, and he finds himself unconsciously arching into its warmth. He grumbles when it disappears, when an accidental shift of his fingers exacerbates things all over again. Too consumed by this to pay attention to what she’s doing, he has no clue where she’s gone until she returns. 

She sits on the edge of the mattress, playing her fingers through the hair on the back of his skull. He sniffles, most of his head buried under the Cloak. “I want to get your temperature,” Christine says gently. “Come out for a second.”

“Later. Go‘way.”

“Stephen…”

“Not a fucking child.”

“Honestly? Sometimes it’s hard to be sure.”

His hand – his head his chest his nose his back – _hurts_ , and he wishes she’d leave so he can smash his face into his pillow and flat out scream. Sure seems like the damn meds should be taking effect by now. “Take m’own temperature. Doctor. Go’way.”

“I just want to help,” she sighs.

“Like you’ll ever let me forget,” he growls, cradling his hand against his chest as he rolls over. With his back to her, he burrows again under the Cloak.

Her exhale is abrupt, and he knows from experience that he’s finally found her limit. His twitch of a masochistic grin twists into a wince as pain ratchets over the back of his hand and up his wrist to his elbow. “Fine,” she says behind him, practically stomping her way across the room. “I’m leaving. Drink some water.”

He listens to retrieving her bag from the bathroom, follows the sound of her boots as she walks out the open door. She doesn’t say goodbye. 

Neither does he.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of tag scenes that got out of hand. Notes and disclaimer in chapter one.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

The first thing he notices when he wakes is his tongue, coated and numb and taking up too much space in his mouth. The second is his fractured left hand, shivering with random sparks as it begins to wake as well.

 

The third thing’s the phone. In the silence of the Sanctum, he can hear it jangling insistently downstairs.

 

Stephen groans, thinks about ignoring it. A decision that seems made when the phone abruptly stops ringing. Satisfied, his eyelids flutter closed as he tries to return to sleep. But the pains in his hand are getting sharper, and he knows it’s probably only going to get worse. He should really just get up now.

 

He shoves himself up onto his elbow, squinting at the clock through the congested beat in his head. He’s not sure exactly what time it was when they got back, but he thinks he’s only slept for a few hours. A light-headed nausea greets him when he finally manages to sit up. He swings his legs over the side of the bed, not sure when he last ate anything either. He’s still wearing his boots.

 

Stephen drags his right hand down his face, sniffs and wipes the back of it under his nose. The edge of the bed and the floor below it are littered with wadded clumps of toilet paper, tissues he doesn’t remember using. He brushes the ones on the comforter to the ground, half-heartedly kicks them into something like a pile. Pushing off of the mattress one-handed, he waves away the Cloak when it floats in and attempts to settle over his shoulders.

 

“Coming right back,” he mutters, stumbling toward the bathroom. The Cloak hovers along behind anyway.

 

The sun’s making an effort to come out today, peeking between the clouds to trickle a fragile light in through the windows. Bright enough that he can disregard the wall switch; he doesn’t look at it or his reflection as he opens the medicine cabinet and grabs the bottle of oxycodone. Using his teeth, he pops open the easy-off cap. Shakes a few of the tablets out onto the counter, puts all but two of them back. He leaves the cap off this time, so that he doesn’t have to bother with it later.

 

The pills irritate his sore throat, and the second one takes extra work to get down. He turns on the cold water, ducks his head to drink from the stream. After a second he submerges his face as well. He knows he needs more fluids, some food. But he’s not willing to go all the way downstairs when his bed’s so much closer; he decides it can wait until later. After all, sleep is important too.

 

He urinates, grabs another handful of toilet paper to use as tissues. Makes it all the way back to the bed before the phone rings again. It sounds shrill, even at this distance. Maybe because he’s sure that whoever’s at the other end is going to have something that they want him to do.

 

Probably important if they’re calling again; too much of a coincidence to think this call and the last aren’t related. He could unplug the phone. Tell them he’s dying. Refer them to Wong or one of the other Masters for help. He can just imagine the expression – or lack thereof – on Wong’s face if he tried that last one. Stephen heads for the door before he registers that he’s going to, wondering if he might not spend a little too much time worrying about what Wong thinks.

 

He’s flagging before he even reaches the top of the stairs, his body feeling bruised and lethargic. When a dramatic sneeze unbalances him two steps down the staircase, the Cloak swirls around him. It bends to swoop his legs out from under him, carries him down the steps like he’s riding in a sedan chair. Stephen struggles at first, gives up quickly. He rests his head back against the Cloak’s high collar and closes his eyes.

 

The damn phone’s still ringing.

 

His eyelids feel glued together when he peels them apart, the sitting room fuzzy despite his attempts to blink it into focus. The walls still shifting despite the fact that he’s sure he’s no longer moving. When he tries to stand, he finds that the Cloak’s new molded shape makes it impossible to get to his feet. “Let me down,” he grumbles, making another wiggling effort to free himself.

 

The Cloak straightens, releasing him; Stephen slumps against the curve of the round table, reaching across his body for the receiver of the vintage phone. He’s a little surprised that the caller hasn’t given up yet. He’d been hoping that they would. “What?” he croaks when he gets the bulky thing up to his ear.

 

“I, uh… Strange?”

 

He doesn’t think he’s ever heard Rogers sound so uncertain. It’d be highly entertaining under other circumstances, but right now he just wants to end this conversation and go back to bed. “Obviously. Why? Were you hoping someone else would answer?”

 

“No. Of course not. It didn’t sound like you, is all.”

 

He’s already tired of being upright, and how can his head feel so light when the rest of his body’s so impossibly heavy? “Well it’s me. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I assume you called for a reason?”    

 

“There’s a hostile. Using some strange – that is, uh, _odd_ – energy to create an army. Tony’s on his way to investigate.”

 

Stephen wedges the receiver between his ear and his shoulder, grabs the other half of the phone with his good hand and slides down the wall to sit on the floor. The cord’s coils stretch as he sets the weighted base on the rug next to his hip. “So why do you need me?”

 

“S.H.I.E.L.D. wants him alive. And the preliminary data is suggesting this might be your kind of thing.”

 

“My kind of thing,” he echoes. There’s an ominous prickling in his frontal sinuses. His broken hand barks as he uses it to cover the phone’s mouthpiece; he holds the receiver away from his head and leans the other way to sneeze. He sniffles, tries to clear his throat before bringing the phone back to his ear. “Where?”

 

“Denmark,” Rogers answers, before giving Stephen the name of a town that he’s going to have a hell of a time locating on Google Maps. It’s a lot easier if he can visualize the place he’s opening a portal to; he’s found that the street view from Google is usually a good place to start.

 

“You want to spell that?”

 

“Just come with us,” the captain replies. “We’re wheels-up in twenty.”

 

New York to Denmark. That was what, seven or eight hours? “I’ll meet you there,” he tells Rogers. Maybe eight hours of sleep will be enough to shake this off. “Call me. When you –“

 

The coughing is as unexpected as it is inescapable; he tries to smother it in the crook of his elbow, pressing the receiver hard against his thigh in an attempt to muffle the harsh sound. When he gets it under control, his head’s throbbing in time with his tonsils. It takes a few seconds more to calm his rapid breathing. “Call me when you land,” he finally rasps into the phone.

 

“Look, I really think we could use you with us on this. But if you’re not up to it…”

 

He doesn’t need Rogers’ pity, almost tells him so. Moreover, if his assistance will end this whatever it is quickly, will save lives, he doesn’t see that much of a choice. There’s a lot fewer Masters left after Kaecilius’ run with his zealots. He’s willing to bet he’s the only one the Avengers have on speed dial. “I’m fine. I’ll be there,” Stephen replies, his voice hoarse and unfamiliar.

 

He hangs up on whatever Rogers says next.

 

Eight hours. He’s got eight hours before anyone’s going to bother him. The promise of sleep swells to push out all other thoughts, including any compelling reason why it shouldn’t just start right now. Stephen eyes the hated settee, decides he’s better off where he is. The rug’s soft enough. Tipping sideways, he reorients himself to lie horizontally on the floor. He cradles his left hand protectively against his sternum, closes his eyes.

 

He’s jarred by a gentle but insistent tugging at his shoulders; the Cloak apparently objects to his choice of sleeping arrangements. “S’fine for now,” he mumbles, not opening his eyes. “Don’t wanna climb all those stairs.”

 

Suddenly he’s weightless; his stomach flips and his eyes snap open. He’s surrounded by the red of the Cloak, but he gets a blurry glimpse of the doorframe as they pass through it. “This works too,” he shrugs. The cocoon of the Cloak rocks gently as they cross the foyer toward the staircase.  

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The portal hovers an inexplicable ten to twelve inches above the ground. Stephen really wishes he’d known that before he made his floundering, stumbled entrance into Denmark.

 

Luckily he finds himself some distance from the action, alone at the end of this winding cobblestone street but for the terrified faces he sees darting and vanishing from behind drawn curtains. He doubts he’s inspiring a lot of confidence, appearing with his head held deliberately high only to almost fall flat on his face. He hopes they missed that part.

 

A cloud of dust and rubble billows up from around a bend, and Stephen starts to trudge that way. He doesn’t feel better for any sleep he may have gotten; doesn’t remember if he slept at all, the restless hours mostly lost. It’s an alarming sensation for a man who remembers virtually everything. And far, far too reminiscent of those months following the accident.

 

He tries to push the memories away, a challenge made easier than usual by the foggy distance in his head. Unfortunate that it’s also making it so much more difficult to focus. He needs to pull it together, needs to be sure that he’s more of an asset than a liability. He’s already here. The Avengers are here. He’ll provide a little backup, be home and back in bed in no time. He can definitely do this.

 

The Cloak nudges him, and Stephen realizes he’s stopped in the middle of the street. His eyes refocus on the dry gutter that rounds the opposite corner.

 

Christ.

 

The Cloak unilaterally decides to hurry things along, lifting his feet just off the stones in order to better sweep him forward. It seems a blink before they’re rounding the distant curve. There’s evidence of destruction everywhere, overturned cars and smashed buildings futile broken sentries bordering the torn-up street. He passes a sign post bent nearly in half, a metal arrow pointing up toward a smoky sky. When he follows its direction, there’s a flash of the red and gold of Stark’s metal suit before the billionaire dips back below the roof top line.    

   

He spots Romanoff on the street first, a blur of black leather as she holds her own against three faceless silver creatures. Stephen wonders if it’s the tentacles that supposedly make this his “kind of thing.” The bolt of energy he sends that way knocks two of them down; Romanoff dispatches the third with a spinning kick that almost takes off the thing’s head. Or at least what Stephen assumes is the head.

 

He steps around a crumpled trash can to close the space between them, the sounds of the battle oddly muffled. He’s not sure if it’s the dust or the congestion between his ears. Romanoff spares him only an arched eyebrow glance as she surveys the mangled street for the next threat.  

 

“Laundry day?” she asks with a smirk.

 

He looks down to find not the expected blue tunic but the t-shirt and sweatpants he’d slept in. Worse still, his feet are bare. It’s fundamentally jarring, and for a moment all he can do is blink down at himself. How could he possibly have left the Sanctum like this? How could he not have noticed that he’s not wearing _shoes_? His brain does nothing but click and spin, refusing to offer up any explanations.

 

Romanoff swears, takes off running. Stephen’s head comes up to see Rogers tumbling out from behind a pile of dirt and stone with two of the silver creatures clinging on tight. They’re probably each five feet long, and Rogers is only visible in bits as he thrashes beneath them. His free hand scrabbles to dislodge the one that seems intent on wrapping itself around his face.

 

Romanoff joins the effort; Stephen conjures a sizzling whip to deal with the one pinning the captain’s other arm. The magic cord makes quick work of it, hurling the thing through the cracked front window of what used to be a bakery. He doesn’t actually hear the glass shatter, but he’d swear he sees a comical puff of what he imagines is powdered sugar waft out to dissipate into the haze outside. He turns back to the two Avengers in time to watch Romanoff crack the other featureless head into the ground for at least the second time. There’s already a glossy shine of blue fluid leaking out to pool on the street beneath it.

 

Rogers is gasping but sitting up when Stephen gets there. The Widow offers him a hand when the doctor doesn’t. “We got pushed back,” he’s saying as he gets to his feet, the slightly breathy explanation competing with a muted far-flung rumble of what’s either thunder or that huge green monster they call the Hulk. “They’re at the town center.”

 

“Seems like that’s probably where we should be then,” Stephen quips irritably. He’s surprised by how hot it is here. Sweat begins to gather under the hairs on his upper lip. “I suggest you lead the way.”

 

They pick a path around chunks of metal and brick, the hum of Rogers’ voice presumably an attempt to fill Stephen in on the situation. He knows he needs to be listening, but despite this certainty can’t seem to think about anything besides the thick air or the distracting way his t-shirt sticks damply to his chest and back. There’s also a considerable amount of focus being directed toward where he puts his bare feet. Something explodes on the next street over, and Rogers finally stops talking as they speed up their uneven pace.

 

“Aw, no fair. Nobody told _me_ it was Casual Dress Day.”

 

He’d sensed no warning of the archer’s arrival behind them, but Stephen recognizes Barton’s voice even before he turns. His eyes automatically flick over the surrounding area, pointlessly trying to determine where the man came from. Light glints off the one surviving window in a building across the street to bounce maliciously back at him, and he winces. “I knew that with my help this wouldn’t take long,” Stephen responds dryly.

 

“Whatever,” Barton sneers. “How’s your hand?”

 

The question triggers a staggering flare of pain in his left hand, the Cloak catching his weight as his knees start to fold. Sucking air through his teeth, he has no choice but to wait until it’s faded to a more manageable throbbing. Through cracked eyelids he watches as a deep purple and black bruising spreads mottled over the back of his scarred knuckles; it feels somehow right there, familiar. As soon as he can move again he hides the incriminating thing in the Cloak.

 

“It’s fine,” he hisses. “Let’s go.”

 

The street seems to stretch on endlessly, a big claim for someone so well-versed in the definitions of _forever_. He’s not entirely sure that that intersection’s even getting any closer. Occasionally, he gets a glimpse of red and gold or green against the sky. His feet don’t hurt at all, oddly enough, but the disturbingly pervasive weakness beginning to creep through the muscles of his arms and legs might eventually be cause for some concern.

 

“You waste time,” Wong says from beside him. “Neglect your duties.”

 

“What are you talk—” Rogers stops abruptly in front of Stephen, and the protest stutters when the Cloak yanks at his shoulders to keep him from plowing into the other man. “—talking about?” he finishes, creating a temporary shield to slow the new group oozing ominously up out of the rubble ahead. “You’re saying that faceless space octopuses somehow don’t fall into the sphere of my duties?”

 

Wong crosses his arms, glowering, but Stephen really feels like he’s made his point. He swipes at his slick forehead with the back of his less-damaged right hand. It’s so hot. He doesn’t understand how everybody else can stand wearing those heavy jackets and gloves. Rogers must be hideously uncomfortable in those oversized furry earmuffs.

 

Wong gestures with his chin to something beyond Stephen’s left shoulder. He turns to see one of the creatures in question leaping at him from out of nowhere.

_Leaping? Certainly airborne. How do they even do —?_

 

It tackles him; tentacles snake around his chest and ribs, start to squeeze. Amazingly it’s left his arms free, but even when he realizes this he finds he can’t make either extremity move. Nor his hands. And it’s getting a little difficult to breathe. Stephen twists his neck, looking to Wong for help, but the other Master is simply gone. He writhes under the weight of the creature, desperately trying to make his fingers at least twitch.

 

Even in this perilous situation, the irony is not lost on him.

 

He searches his mind for a spell, any spell; the only thing he can dredge up is a short incantation intended to exude a sort of mystical slime from the conjurer’s skin. He’s never tried it, had come across it randomly one day in his reading and – despite the idea sounding both disgusting and hardly necessary – had been entertained enough by the novelty to commit it to memory along with the other two spells on the page. He’s not at all excited to have finally found a use for it.

 

The tentacles tighten and his breath comes out in a wheeze. Stephen calls on his eidetic memory and visualizes the old book, the paper rough and yellowing. The ink of the swirling script faded long ago from black to brown. But when he turns his mind’s eye to the words themselves, he finds them to be only meaningless symbols. No language he’s ever seen before, and certainly nothing he’s able to read. There’s a bubbling panic building now. He’s tumbling helplessly through the air, the seatbelt digging into his chest.

 

Then the weight is suddenly gone, though he discovers himself still unable to pull in a deep breath. Stephen blinks up at the silhouette figure of Rogers looming over him. With the sun behind him, those earmuffs give his head a decidedly alien shape.  

 

Rogers extends a hand down to him, but Stephen finds he still can’t move his arms. Before he can fully process this, the captain reaches down and hauls him up by the bicep. “You really are sort of useless, aren’t you?” the man murmurs in his ear once they’re nearer to level with one another. “Next time I won’t bother to call.”

 

Stephen jerks away, affronted, and is somehow at last able to raise his arms and make his recalcitrant fingers trace a helpful pattern. The resulting blast sends one of the approaching creatures flying into the side of a parked car. He’ll show Rogers how useful he can be.

 

The battle rages on in a kind of repetitive loop; somewhere in his sweltering exhaustion it occurs to Stephen that they’re not getting any nearer to the center of town. But there’s nothing for it except to keep fighting. No shortage of the enemies pinning them in place. Arms ponderous and only minimally cooperative, leg muscles achy and cramping, he can concentrate on little more than remaining standing and not hitting any of his temporary teammates. Wiping away a trickle of sweat by his ear, he absently watches Romanoff wrangle one of the silver creatures to ground with her thick grey scarf.

 

And now he’s scrambling up a dusty shifting pile close behind her, despite having no recollection of when it was that he’d started to move. It’s more like a mountain, really, stretching up and out to completely block their view of the other side, and instinctively he knows that the only way around it is over. Too bad that peak looks so hopelessly far away. He’s got an excellent angle on Romanoff’s ass, though; he tries to focus on that bright spot rather than the muted screaming of his trembling limbs.

 

It isn’t until he slips, sliding a breathless few feet before being able to stop his own momentum, that he realizes the Cloak is no longer with him.  

 

Panting, fingers digging for any purchase they can find, Stephen tentatively lifts his head from the sharp debris it’s resting on to look around for any sign of the relic. The ground is a distant blurry thing, the Cloak nowhere in sight. Seeing no other option, he returns to his climbing. Romanoff’s way ahead of him now, almost at the top.

 

She waits for him there; he joins her at the peak. Stephen drags himself up the last few inches with wobbly, complaining arms, lifting himself just enough to peer over the edge. On the other side of their mountain, Dormammu’s monstrous face swallows the entire sky.

 

He’s standing, flailing, falling. Glass splintering into diamonds, the crunch of metal and bones. That inescapable high, mad ringing. He lands at the bottom disoriented, hyperventilating. His hands hysterically drawing symbols in the air, frantically seeking even the meagerest of protections. Christine crouches beside him, wraps her hands around his as if to still them.

 

He tries to pull away, a terrified animal keening percolating in his chest as Dormammu hovers grinning and motionless over her shoulder. Christine’s wrapping the Cloak around his fingers, binding them. “I just want to help,” she tells him.

 

Stephen struggles, maybe screams. All he can hear is her voice, that eternal crushing ringing. “Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not real,” she says. Behind her, Dormammu’s massive mouth simultaneously forms the words.

 

“It’s too hot,” he croaks, the last thing he’d wanted to say.

 

“It’s not. It’s snowing.” She’s a whisper that circles his head.

 

“Inside?” Why would he ask that? “We need to go…” There’s nowhere to go.

 

Christine presses a pillow firmly but gently to his face. In his blindness, his suffocation, he feels her lips brush his earlobe with her exhale. “Stephen, listen to me: I promise you, none of this is real...”

 

He jerks out of the nightmare gasping, for a moment still blind and smothered. Now there’s the faint smell of strawberries and sweat; he eventually convinces his eyes to open, but the room around him refuses to come more than half into focus. His nose feels gigantic, raw, and he’s pretty sure there’s some sort of invisible demon sitting directly on the center of his sternum.

 

“Stephen? Stephen, can you hear me?”

 

And his hands – oh christ, his hands. Alit from within by pure electrical fire, howling and straining and _burning_. He raises his head only far enough to squint down his body at them; they’re moving of their own accord above his abdomen, jumping and twisting under the futile restraint of Christine’s smaller fingers. It feels as if they’ve been doing that for a while.

 

“Stephen, I need you to stop. Are you listening?”

 

Her very careful calm pings in a tiny unclouded bit of his brain, and with a blink he finally understands why. Sparks and partially-formed symbols decorate the air around the bed. The nightstand and the old cedar wardrobe appear to be crookedly levitating.

 

The inside of his mouth is papery dry; the congestion in his nose and throat makes him feel like he’s drowning. He pries his tongue from where it’s stuck behind his teeth and tries to shape words for her, but his inhalation tickles his irritated tonsils and starts him coughing. There’s nothing he can do but curl away from her and let the hacking spasms convulse his frame. Between the stabbing in his chest and the banging in his head, he distantly registers the uneven crash of furniture finding the ground. It’s barely audible to his plugged ears under all the noise he’s making.  

 

The fit leaves him drained and shaking, and when Christine touches his back and tries to coax him into turning over, it’s several long exhausted seconds before he can make his body comply. Stephen sniffles, rolls onto his spine. Even his eyes hurt. They certainly feel much better closed.

 

“Hey, just a few seconds and you can go back to sleep. Okay?”

 

It sounds like a question, like she’s giving him a choice. He knows from experience that she’s not. “Mmm…” he manages, a thick growly hum. His eyes roll uselessly when he’s finally able to pull them open.

 

The lines of a water glass sharpen and soften in front of him. “First this.”

 

There’s no way the hands fluttering weakly against his abdomen are going to be capable of holding anything. He’s not even sure he can raise his arms. Instead of explaining this to her, it seems much easier just to close his eyes.

 

“Nope,” Christine chides, sliding an arm behind his shoulders to help him sit up a bit against the pile of pillows. Stephen grumbles, coughs. She holds the glass while he sips from it without him having to ask, and he realizes he shouldn’t have expected otherwise. Unpleasant memories press at the edges of his hazy mind. “Do you know where you are?” she asks him.

 

This feels to Stephen like a fundamentally stupid question. “… course.”

 

“Really? Because you haven’t been too sure for the last few hours.”

 

His brain grabs onto this, tries for a moment to examine it. But it’s too much effort to hold onto all these slippery thoughts, and he lets this one go when it starts to wriggle away.

 

“Stephen?”

 

Prompting, like she wants something. He pulls himself from wherever he’s been to look for her question. “Sanctum,” he grunts. Rolling his head over the pillow, he follows the glass in her hand back to the nightstand and spots a box of tissues. His arm twitches in a feeble gesture.

 

She grabs a fistful, drops them onto his stomach. “I want to start an IV, try to get you rehydrated,” she says, as he blows his nose loudly and repeatedly. “I would’ve done it sooner, but I was afraid you’d pull it out with all that thrashing around.”

 

The tissue paper brushes annoyingly against his skin under his trembling hands, but he uses all of them. His arms fall, too weighted to hold up, and the back of his hand comes down on something. A cold pack no longer cold. The air sizzles and bends around him.

 

His eyelids sink again.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Waking implies having slept, or at least some measure of unawareness. Stephen doesn’t know. In the stretchy seconds it takes for the room to sharpen around him, he isn’t even entirely sure where he is. There’s no panic in his muddled lethargy, only a curious confusion. He turns his heavy head, searching for the window and its expensive city view.

 

But it’s not there and these furnishings are all wrong – _wrong, Wong, Sanctum_ – and his head pounds with a rush of jumbled thoughts as he realizes where he is. He doesn’t move for a moment, exhausted by this small victory. It’s quiet. Or would be if not for the gurgling sounds he’s making while trying to breathe.

 

He’s alone, though he seems to recall Christine being here. Had that been a dream? Maybe, because there’s also a picture in his mind of Rogers wearing fuzzy earmuffs that feels just as recent. But when he lifts an arm to rub at a bleary eye, he’s stopped by a faint tug and finds a needle sticking out of the back of his right hand. He traces the plastic tubing up to an empty crinkled bag hanging from a metal IV pole. Not only had Christine been here, but it seems she’d thought of everything.

 

Probably because this is far from the first time that she’s had to hook him up to an IV in his bedroom.

 

Shying away from the memories, he discovers that the influx of fluids has as usual left his bladder uncomfortably full. The last thing he wants to do is attempt to stand up, but there’s really no other choice. His swollen left hand pulses an echo in his tonsils as he tries to manipulate his fingers into pulling out the needle. It’s a clumsy effort, and there’s blood on the sheets before he can manage to apply enough pressure with the heel of the broken hand.

 

Stephen scowls at the dark wet splatter. He’ll get the stains out later. Without the use of the hands pressed trembling against one another, he wiggles into more of a sitting position. He’d love to rest here, take a second for the congestion in his head to resettle. But his bladder’s becoming insistent.

 

Disentangling himself from the sheets and getting his feet on the floor feels another journey, another triumph, though any self-satisfaction is quickly erased when his initial try at standing immediately fails. He makes it to his feet on the second attempt; the air shimmies as he fights to draw sufficient breath through the tight bands around his chest.

 

His feet shuffle an autonomous path to the bathroom, his body stiff and hunched around his connected hands. Remembering something about floating furniture, he glances toward the wardrobe as he passes. There’s a jagged crack across the front of the wood, undeniable evidence of its abrupt and awkward landing.

 

There’s also a two foot gouge in the plaster of the ceiling. The edges look singed. He’ll have to make sure nothing’s been damaged upstairs.

 

Hours later he finally makes it to his destination, and after a bit of fumbling and pawing gets himself oriented to do what he needs to do. The sensation is bliss. Mission accomplished, his body suddenly decides that it’s had enough of being vertical. One minute he’s flushing the toilet; in the next he finds himself slumped on the tile, his back against the ceramic of the tub and a dizzy roaring in his ears.

 

Stephen coughs, moans. Wishes he could at least reach the roll of toilet paper from down here. Especially as it feels like it might be a while before he can coerce his body into getting back up. He idly wonders where Christine’s gone, if she has plans to return. Then he starts wondering what day it is.

 

Still daytime, says the small window, or possibly daytime again. A messy sneeze rocks through him, followed by another that explodes behind his eyes, and he swiftly loses interest in anything other than how rotten he feels. One of Dormammu’s more creative deaths had been to bury him under a huge pile of squirming rabbit-like creatures; ridiculous as it might seem now, he’s yet to be able to look at a bunny since coming back to Earth without feeling threatened. This is somewhere between that and the wannabe god’s many, many variations on drowning.

 

He doesn’t know how long he sits there before Christine rushes through the open door looking as if she’s lost something. “Had to piss,” he explains gruffly to her wide eyes. “Now apparently I’m down here.”

 

She visibly relaxes; this situation too is familiar. “Oh. Okay. How about a bath?”

 

“Maybe,” Stephen shrugs. He pulls his legs to his chest to rest his forehead on bent knees, instantly raises his head again at the intolerable increase in sinus pressure. He sniffs, coughs. Christine moves around him to start filling the tub.

 

“How’re you doing?” she asks, perching on the edge above him.

 

He hates this question, especially from her. “Nothing’s levitating, is it?”

 

She ignores the tone, motions for him to lift his arms so she can get his shirt off. Helps him clamber slowly up to the edge of the tub to sit and remove the sweatpants. Resignation skitters like a chill over his bare skin. “What’re you doing here anyway?” he growls, not looking at her.

 

“You’re terrible at taking care of yourself when you don’t feel well. After arguing with myself for a while, I grabbed some supplies and came back.” Still holding onto him with one hand, she shuts off the water.

 

The antique bathtub is more difficult to step into than the one in his condo, and they have to modify their practiced routine a little for her to support him as he climbs unsteadily in. He’s expecting the water to be either too hot or too cold, but he doesn’t really feel it at all as his foot breaks the surface. “You came back to take care of me,” he reiterates nasally.

 

She leans a hip against the counter, watching him. “The plan was more just to make sure you didn’t need anything. Once I saw the state of you, I decided to stay a little longer.”

 

“Mmm…” Stephen sinks into the tepid water, almost able to stretch out his long legs. It’d be easy to fall asleep like this, but an urgent thought occurs. “Wait, how… who let you in?” Had he left the place unwarded? Unforgivably sloppy, no matter what condition he might be in.

 

“You did,” Christine says. All he can do is blink up at her, gaping a bit. Though that’s due at least in part to his complete inability to breathe through his nose at the moment. “You were already pretty out of it, clearly febrile. Your magic cape had to help me get you upstairs.”

 

“Cloak,” he murmurs without thinking, his attention already drifting off. There’s a fat drop suspended from the edge of the faucet, seconds from its inevitable plunge. When it falls he falls with it, and as they hit the water together there’s the sudden glare of a crucial piece revealed as absent. Stephen pulls his eyes from the water, looks around the bathroom as if he may have somehow missed it. “Where… ?”

 

Christine glances toward the open door, shrugs. “In the other room, probably. It seems to be keeping its distance since you tried to throw it through the window. Why, am I supposed to be watching it?”

 

His hands jump on the porcelain where his forearms are resting. “I did what?”

 

“It was trying to… help me, I guess? I didn’t really know if it would stop the spells, but after you almost set the ceiling on fire…” There’s humor in the tone, but her exhale sounds a somewhat tremulous laugh. He wonders if that betraying warble is actually in her voice or in his head. “Anyway,” she regroups, “it was wrapping itself around your hands when you just kinda flung it across the room. There’s a crack in the window.”

 

He’s utterly dumbfounded. His relationship with the Cloak feels one of virtual unity, the relic seeming to often be able to read his very thoughts. Stephen can’t imagine what could have so distracted it that he’d been able to take it by surprise.

 

“You were obviously delirious. It wasn’t your fault.”

 

Reclining back into the water again, he doesn’t bother to correct her assumption. Though he should probably get up soon and go apologize. He wonders if the Cloak’s wariness signifies scared or sulking.

 

Likely the latter.

 

“Are you okay in here for a bit?” Christine asks, stretching as she straightens. “I want to change the sheets on the bed.”

 

He grunts an affirmative, and apparently she knows well enough by now not to expect anything more. Instead of watching her go, he lets his arms slide down the white ceramic to float just under the water by his thighs. Aimlessly he contemplates the juxtaposition of his hands.

 

The tiny ragged puncture on the right one had stopped bleeding, but there’s a bright sting there now. A wisp of clouded water disperses effortlessly into the rest as the wound reopens a little. The left, by contrast, feels better than it has in a while. It may look a mangled mess in the distorting bathwater, but the temperate weightlessness eases some of the stress in the contracted muscles and tendons. He knows it’s a respite unlikely to last for long, but in this context he’ll take any win he can get.

 

Stephen tips back his head and closes his eyes, the miniscule tide lapping at the warm hypersensitive skin of an exposed bent knee, his toes. He thinks about the custom-built jacuzzi in his condo, for a moment can even feel the jets. He loved that jacuzzi. There’s a trickle of water spilling over his shoulder to run down his arm, something soft and sodden sponging at his chest. When he wrestles his eyes open, Christine’s kneeling beside the bathtub, her face only about six inches away. 

 

Had he fallen asleep? His thoughts are sticky and his head too heavy to lift. She smiles at him, but all he can do is blink dumbly at her, vaguely tracking her motions. Finally he clears his throat, finds a gravelly imitation of his voice. “… be a lot more fun if you waited until I was awake…”

 

“Not supposed to be fun,” she teases. “You stink.”

 

“… f’you want to get me naked… just have to ask.”

 

She gives him a look that goes with the gentle shove to his arm, returns to the sponge bath. “Please. A half an hour ago you thought you were in Denmark.”

 

_Rogers_. He bolts upright, splashing them both as his arm surges up out of the water to grab for the edge of the tub. He’s supposed to be in Denmark. Isn’t he? Did that phone call actually happen? The bathwater is all waves now as he tries to get into a better position from which to stand. “How long… what time is it?” His eyes dart around the room as if he might make a clock suddenly appear where none had been before. Seems like something he should be able to do.

 

“Hey, where are you going?” She’s startled, worried. Trying to cover it all with a practiced calm. Irregular patches of water darken the denim of her jeans.

 

Nowhere, apparently. He’s stuck on his knees, weak and panting from the minor flurry of physical activity. His hand grips the rounded porcelain edge as the air rocks at the same speed as the water settling around him. “Time,” he demands between sharp raspy breaths. “What. Time. Is. It.”

 

“Relax. Where is it you think you need to go?” Mollification drips from her voice like water from his skin. He glares at both of her, drops his head when the diplopia starts making him nauseous.

 

“Avengers…” he mumbles, but now he’s coughing again – christ, when is this going to be _over_? – and the shivery vertiginous instability that follows gives him no choice but to sink back onto his heels. He shifts onto a hip, pries his fingers loose from the ceramic to bend his arm into a pillow for his aching head. The side of the tub is solid and cool where his ribcage presses against it.

 

Fingertips touch his hair; the shape of a familiar hand rests lightly on his head for a moment, disappears. “If you mean Captain Rogers,” she says, taking advantage of his new position by turning her attention to washing his back, “I talked to him.”

 

Something like irritation fizzles out before he can identify it. Stephen’s not about to try and lift his head, but he turns it enough to be able to squint at her with one eye. She’s close, leaning over him, and all he can really see from this angle is the white cotton of her shirt where it covers her abdomen. “ _You_ talked to him.”  

 

“I did. And he actually remembered me from the benefit, which is sweet…”

 

“Spare me,” Stephen groans. “M’already nauseous. What… uh, what…”

 

“Did I tell him?” she finishes, when his fickle focus is yanked away by fever and the exposed slice of skin where her shirt’s riding up as she stretches. “That, as your doctor, it was my opinion that you weren’t fit for duty. Nor would be in time to take part in the current mission.”

 

Stephen groans again. He buries his head back in the crook of his elbow, hoping that this part is a dream too.

 

“Which he wouldn’t tell me anything about, by the way. What’s in Denmark?”

 

Dormammu’s face appears out of the darkness behind his eyelids, and he moves to disguise his flinch. He sits up as slowly as possible, most of his weight still slumped against the side of the bathtub. Instead of warming with his body heat, the porcelain seems even colder than before. “Dunno. Didn’t get to go.”

 

Christine shifts back a little, smiling. Or at least that’s the impression he gets from his brief glimpse of her face; it’s too difficult to hold up his head, much easier to let his gaze fall where it will. The curve of her knees in their denim skin, that pale blue unnaturally bright against the blurry tile. “Don’t say it like I wouldn’t let you go on the school field trip,” she scoffs.

 

“Never been to Denmark,” he pouts, mostly just because he’s feeling so unbearably cranky. But now he’s thinking about octopus. Do they have octopus in Denmark? His eyes slide past his water-covered thighs to the broken hand that floats beside him. He tries to flex his fingers, doesn’t get very far. “What’d he say?”

 

“That he hopes you’ll feel better soon, that he’ll be in touch. Why, what did you expect him to say?”

 

His hand’s a balloon animal gone horribly wrong, swollen and grotesque. Time catches and slips, and he has to look at the other one to be certain he’s not recovering from another surgery. Unless they’d decided to only do one at a time this round; they’d discussed it before. To give him more functionality, they’d said, more independence. As if this was actually his life. As if he was going to have to learn to live with limitation.

 

“Ready to go back to bed?” Christine asks. “Or do you want me to wash your hair?”

 

He’d forgotten she was here – had he known she was here? – and he looks that way. The puzzle pieces of his timeline shift around, click back into their proper place. But still he can’t seem to do anything other than stare blankly at her. She’d asked him something. A rhetorical question? Probably not. But nothing of any urgency, surely.

 

Had she spoken at all? He can’t remember. Doesn’t even remember how long they’ve been sitting here.

 

Christine reaches for him, brushes a few strands of damp hair off his forehead. His eyes close when she presses the backs of her fingers against his cheek. The cold spot sings out of the flames dancing over the rest of his skin, and he moans softly when she takes it away.

 

“How’s your hand?” she asks on the other side of his eyelids. “Looks like it hurts.”

 

He slouches down as far as he’s able so as to rest the side of his face on the ceramic edge. “Always hurts.”

 

“I took a look earlier, while you were out of it. It’s hard to tell with all the swelling, but it didn’t feel like anything’s displaced.”

 

He could’ve told her that. He sucks in a breath to say this, and his lungs rebel. Moist air bounces back into his face from the porcelain as he coughs; his chest and throat burn. For once in a long while it feels like his hands are the least of his problems.

 

She runs her fingers through his hair, short nails lightly scratching his scalp. “I still want to get an x-ray.”

 

The hand twitches on cue, zigzagging a crack of pain from his knuckles to his wrist. “Why bother?” His grainy whisper winds through the air between them; Stephen tries to clear his throat. “Fine. Later,” he agrees, just to end the conversation. “Don’t you have to work or something?”  

 

“Apparently I’m taking another sick day.”

 

Part of him wants to snap at her, insist that he’s that he’s not an invalid. A larger part wants her to never stop doing that with her fingers. “Hmm…”

 

He needs to get up, go find Rogers. No, the Cloak. Because… because, because…

 

Her fingers leave his hair, and he slits open an eye to see her getting to her feet. She grabs the towel hanging from its hook. “Come on. Out before you fall asleep.”

 

Laboriously he unbends from his contorted angles, bones brittle and untrustworthy as he makes them take weight. Back to his knees, the sloshing bathwater creating a motion that’s mimicked in his head. The deafening congestion in his left ear only adds to the imbalance, but he waves Christine off with a scowl when she moves in as if to assist. He climbs out of the tub by centimeters, trying to ignore her as she hovers on standby.  

 

He manages it on his own, but chills and weakness rattle through him on the tails of a barking cough. Snatching the towel from her hand, he borrows the relative stability of the counter as he wraps the terrycloth around his waist. His hands are shaky, uncooperative. He swears as one bumps the other, setting off new pain in both.

 

“Oh,” Christine abruptly remembers, while Stephen’s busy struggling to manage the impossibility of both breathing and standing at the same time, “I also talked to… Master Wong?”

 

“Stop answering my phone,” he grumbles, leaning more heavily against the counter. The air begins to thicken, pressing against his wet skin.

 

“What, you want me to just ignore it?” she asks, her voice slowed and warping.

 

“Yes.” He has to push the syllable through his teeth.

 

“But what if it’s impor— Stephen?”

 

He’s closed his eyes, but he can’t say when. Her concern flickers like a visible thing in his darkness, and he hums a flat note of response.

 

“What’s going on? Do you want to sit?”

 

“Bed,” he coughs, finally able to force his eyelids apart again. Their insides feel coated with sand, his eyes watering. Christine’s close, at his shoulder. She looks up at him – weighing, worrying – as the wall behind her starts to ripple and flex.

 

Her fingers touch his elbow, tingling tendrils winding up his arm from the point of contact. “Good idea. Are you going to make it that far?”

 

Stephen growls at her, an occluded and annoyed sound, and steps out of the puddle he’s still dripping into. But it does seem a fair question as he starts unsteadily for the door. The floor feels insubstantial and foreign under his bare feet, his knees like they could buckle at any moment. The bedroom is a riot of smeared shapes and colors, too bright even with his tunneling vision. He slogs through it, keeping his focus targeted unwaveringly on the bed.

 

Another jump rope skip in time, and now he’s sprawled gasping and exhausted on the clean sheets. “Do you want clothes?” Christine asks, from somewhere far away.

 

“Mmph,” is the only response he can muster. Even he’s not sure if it’s a yes or a no. The room tilts dizzyingly, and he presses his forehead deep into the yielding softness of the pillow.

 

“There’s almost nothing in your kitchen. I might make a list, go out for a bit. Anything specific that you want?”

 

He only has one mumbled request. “… put me out of m’misery…”

 

“I was thinking more like soup,” she replies, unfazed.

 

“Whatever.” It’s not as if he’ll be able to taste anything with his sinuses blocked like this anyway. He just wants to sleep.

 

She says something about toast, acetaminophen. Or maybe that’s just his own medical training murmuring its basic triage in his head. He gets one eye open, mostly freed from the pillowcase obstruction. There’s no sign of Christine from this angle, but he thinks he sees a flash of red through the doorway in the hall. Real or imagined, it’s gone in the space of a blink.

 

He needs to get up. Go find the Cloak.

 

Instead he burrows underneath the comforter to try and escape the chills, the stabbing light, and moans from the depths of his self-pity. This sets off a wet and protracted coughing fit that he has no hope of mitigating. He’s already too warm under this blanket, but at least it’s dark. Without the energy or motivation to move, he absently opens and closes his eyes in a lazy game of experimentation with the lack of surrounding light.    

 

At some point his eyes must stay closed, because his next conscious awareness is of fresh air tickling his face and the paresthesia in his forearm below where the blanket has twisted around it. Ungluing his eyelids is a monumental task, but he manages. Licking dry lips, he stares stupidly at what seems to be a blurred Wong sitting in a chair not far from the bed.

 

Arms folded across his chest and eyes closed, wearing his headphones. Maybe a gentle bobbing of his head in time with whatever he’s listening to, but Stephen wouldn’t swear that that’s not just an illusion caused by the way his own eyes feel like they’re vibrating in their orbits. Right now he’s not even entirely sure he’s awake at all.

 

One eye opens, fixes on him. After a moment of study it flicks briefly to the right, returns. Another silent, cycloptic appraisal and Wong goes back to his music, both eyes again closed.

 

There’s a swath of red hovering in his peripheral vision, down by the end of the bed, and Stephen doesn’t have to lift his head to know what it is. If this is a fever dream, it’s a rather pleasant one. Even if every inch of his body aches and he still can’t breathe through his nose, even if it’s ridiculous to think Wong would really be here like this. Even if it feels like the pressure in his head might actually kill him, and like no amount of squirming is going to free the foot tangled intractably in the blankets...     

 

“Sleep,” Wong says, without opening his eyes.

 

It’s succinct, wise, persuasive. Stephen finally frees his trapped foot, rolls over. He wishes Christine was here. Despite what she might think, there _are_ occasions when he listens to instruction without arguing about it first.

 

 

 

 

**end.**

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bunnies aren’t just cute like everybody supposes  
> They’ve got those hoppy legs and twitchy little noses  
> And what’s with all the carrots?  
> What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?  
> Bunnies! Bunnies, it must be bunnies!
> 
> -Anya, “Once More With Feeling,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer
> 
>  
> 
> (Anybody still with me?)

**Author's Note:**

> These days I find myself both obsessed with Benedict Cumberbatch and easily irritated by people in the Real World. Because of this, I can’t seem to stop writing Strange. (I suppose one of these days I should finally try my hand at writing Sherlock.) There’s likely a few more scenes to tack onto this – mostly just an excuse to extend the whump and maybe even a bit of comfort for the poor man – but I didn’t want to rush through it in order to get this posted. So here’s this for now, with maybe a second chapter to come.
> 
> CumberCookies unite. For together we shall be a CumberBatch.


End file.
